Dave Asprey
Appearances
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
So I've been deep in technology infrastructure. I ran the web and internet engineering program in Silicon Valley to teach engineers how to build Web 1.0. So I'm just like a deep, deep nerd who's desperately trying to keep my brain and my body working so I can do the tech stuff that I love. That's insane.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
But just to answer your question, it was a long answer.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I knew about early stuff, but then I could have talked more about the OSI model and TCPIP protocols and window sizes. No one knows what that is unless you're a network engineer. So that was my thing, not e-commerce. But then when Salesforce was eight people, they came to us and helped them build their infrastructure. When Google was two guys and two computers, they came to us.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
When the Facebook was eight computers, they came to us. When Hotmail was eight computers, they came to us and we built all that stuff out and we held it in our buildings and built the networks. So that's what I was doing, not learning how to sell T-shirts online. So I wasn't an e-commerce expert.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
But what I was an expert at is technology and understanding the fundamental drive of humans because I was so close to zero. And the way I really got going, I hired a 23-year-old. Okay, now I'm a VP at a big company. Mm-hmm. I'm working my ass off. I have two young kids. I just moved to a new country, to Canada. And I'm very busy as a father and as executive.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And I said, look, you've proven to me, his name's Andrew, that you can solve problems. You have this rare skill of being able to go to Google and say, how do I do something? And then go and do it. And this is very rare. So I said, I'll pay you. And I paid him like 600 bucks a month. He lived in his grandmother's basement for a year and did whatever I needed done. And he did a five out of 10 job.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Made lots of mistakes. In fact, he cost me millions of dollars by doing things the wrong way. He also made me millions of dollars by doing enough things the right way. Right. And that was enough. to start hiring a team. And then what did I do? I hired people who knew more than I did. One of my other first employees, the first employee from Starbucks, I hired her.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And the ninth employee from Starbucks, I hired him. His name's Daryl, right? So I'm like, I know the chemistry and the process of coffee. I do not know all of the coffee industry insider who pays who and who hates who and all this stuff that all industries have. So you just hire that. And I hired people who knew way more than I did.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
But I got it going with young, scrappy people who were just willing because they could see the why and the mission for it. So the e-commerce stuff, my first head of marketing, he was an affiliate marketer who came in and made 60 grand the first month. And I called him and said, dude, can I hire you? Because I don't have time. I'm still working a main job. I don't want to make decisions.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I just need to get the ball moving, get the processes going. So that got us to our 27 million. you
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Let me tell you about the raise for a minute first. I'd worked for the first venture capital firm who wrote a check. And so I'd been in their partner meetings. I've seen lots of pitches. I've seen what they say after the companies leave and just how partners think. It was very educational. And I called up my friends there and I said, I have a company that's growing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
It is not a venture capital company. Like you will never fund this company. I'm in five product categories. There is no acquirer for Bulletproof, but you should give me a million bucks or even 50 grand. I just need $3 million of coffee inventory because I'm selling so fast, I can't get enough coffee.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And they came back and said, oh, this is a VC company and it's worth, you know, here's $8 million, it's worth $40 million. So when I got the money, I was like, this is crazy. And I, I remember thinking to myself, I want to be independent so I can say the truth. It's really important because money does corrupt and venture capitalists are well known for what they do. And it did happen to me too.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
So I kind of had a spiritual discussion with myself. I said, if I take this money, I will lose control at some point, but it's going to give me a license to reach many, many million more people than I could do on my own with organic growth.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
so i said okay this is for the greatest good and i um i took the funding and even by the time i had done my series c i'd set a record since 1986 for maintaining the most founders equity of any entrepreneur from that And that was because I raised when I was in rapid growth and I didn't really need the money. I need it for growth, but I wasn't desperate.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And the sad part of the story and the reason I advise a lot of entrepreneurs now is eventually, you know, years later, I did get removed from my own board of directors and, you know, removed from my own company. And then they sold it for a pittance compared to what it was worth when they let me go, which was traumatic.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And now, though, I've talked to so many entrepreneurs when they're about to get screwed on their term sheets. I'm like, let me help you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
It was valued anywhere between 500 million and a billion, depending on which bankers you listen to and things like that. And we were doing about 140 million in revenue when I was removed.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
There's some things I can share and some I probably am not at liberty to discuss. But the bottom line is VCs almost always want to remove founders. I like to describe them as imagine you pick up a hitchhiker. And you can use their credit card to put gas in the tank as long as you're going where they want to go.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
But as soon as you want to go a different direction, they try to stab you and steal your car. That's the model for venture capital, is it not?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And it wasn't even about change in direction. I had brought in a very senior operator. And to be clear, I hate running $100 million companies. It is the most torturous, boring, like, awful job I can imagine. There are people who love it. It's just for my makeup, I'm the 0-50 guy. Yeah. I can do that over and over and it brings me great joy. After that, it just becomes a slog.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
What I did is I actually decided to replace myself because I don't want to do that kind of work. And I'd say I made a bad choice. And once that person was in there, things just got exceptionally hostile. They did some moves that ended up in some legal situations. And... Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I'll say I uncovered along the way that an executive, not me, was in line to get paid a very substantial amount of money if the company was sold to the right people.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
For a low price. Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Well, in order to facilitate that, or maybe for some other reason, the company suddenly was on the verge of bankruptcy, which was surprising because when they let me go, we weren't in that situation.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
so so yeah then at that point okay they're like well it's kind of we have to sell at this price we have sold this price so i'll just say i from my perception it looks like there were some shenanigans uh so i i did the the normal legal thing that you would do there but the event the vast majority of investors including the vcs who backed me the one i talked about who you know got his energy back
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
They got wiped out. So basically, the company was sold for about 10% of what it was worth.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I'm not certain if that number was ever public. And it's possible that I got that number in some kind of proceeding where it's confidential. So I would be happy to say the exact number, but I don't know if I'm allowed to. So we'll just say it was enough that I was wiped out on my common shares.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I made no money off of the end of the company. Off the sale. I mean, off the sale. Along the way, I made some money. I mean, geez, I was a CEO for 10 years.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I made a decent amount. It was not crazy money, to be honest.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I came up with the word in Tibet, walking around the holiest mountain in the world and came back and wrote blog posts, started the first conference, got it added to the dictionary eventually. Yeah, I invented it. I really did.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I spent $2.5 million over 25 years, yeah. $2.5 million. Brian's whole marketing campaign is exactly the 2016 campaign for Superhuman, my longevity book. And that's cool. We need more longevity voices. Longevity is a movement.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Well, there's this old school anti-aging crowd, and that's what I did in the 90s. And there's still like a conference. It's kind of like a dusty conference. Which one? The Anti-Aging Academy one. Oh, I don't know that one. Yeah. And it's a thing where if you're against aging and you're against death... It kind of reminds me of Mother Teresa once.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
She was invited to join a march against the war, and she goes, absolutely not. And they're like, we thought you would like it. And she goes, I'll join a march for peace, but I won't join a march against the war. Because when you fight against something, it gets stronger. And this comes from the spiritual stuff. And the real reason for biohacking Two things.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Number one, I want young people to understand that there's a reason that they should do longevity. And the reason isn't so they'll live forever. That's nice. It's so you'll have a better brain and more power now. So the things that make old people young make young people more powerful. And entrepreneurs, we're the ones who need it the most. We need the power and the energy now.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And that's why this biohacking stuff took off, number one, with tech entrepreneurs. Mm-hmm. I use the language, it was called the Bulletproof Executive. Number two, hedge fund managers. Number three, Hollywood and recording artists and pro athletes. That's who spread all of this. Totally agree.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
It's because they're the ones with the most cognitively demanding tasks, and they have to look good at the same time, and that is really hard.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Yes.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Well, it's a well-proven playbook that works.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I don't have an issue with that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I mean, I... I did the video on Facebook Live, back when Facebook Live was a thing, of them putting stem cells in my male organs. I'm on Facebook Live and I'm like, don't have the camera on the wrong thing. I've already done all the penis enhancement stuff. We did a whole big thing on that. You did? Oh, yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
i have a company that does that hold on say that again this is like a great clip you did what i injected stem cells in my penis and i did this nine years ago and i have actually added if i want to get a little bit graphic i added two inches with all the different technologies i do not that i needed to but it was like holy i can like that's the human body is a toy what can you do with it and so really
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Yeah. And like, there's video of me doing it. In fact, at my conference, this is one of my favorite scenes ever. Okay, I'm filming, but you can't, you know, you want to film things you can't see. So I'm laying down, there's a blanket propped up so you can't see my junk. And I'm filming, you just see my toes in the blanket. And this gloved hand comes down with this long needle.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And you see the needle go in and then my toes go... And I'm like, this is gonna give me LinkedIn girth, right? And we're all laughing about it. And I played the video at the biohacking conference because I'm like, guys, this is possible. And you can take someone who has ED and you can fix it. And you can take someone who doesn't have ED and you can give them a very young thing.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Because in fact, in my new book, Heavily Meditated, one of the chapters is like tantra and sacred sex stuff is an altered state as important as psychedelics for personal development. That's nourishing for us at a very deep level. So we might as well just talk about it. So one of my companies is called Wasabi Method, and we have a unique type of shockwave device that will put inches on. And
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
That's how it works. So yeah, all that stuff around like, you know, look at my, look at my, look at my cock. Okay. Like been there and it's great. But like we all, every 10 years that you've seen this, every 10 years things recycle. Totally. There's probably a 22 year old right now going, I just figured out you can put butter in coffee and you feel so much better.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And they're going to like, they're going to do this. So true. And it's okay. Right. And what's different maybe about me is, I was mentored by my elders. John Gray taught me a whole bunch of stuff, right? Oh, I love John Gray. John is such a great human being. And I've interviewed 1,200 people on my podcast over the last 14 years.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I've talked to the masters of different lineages of spiritual stuff, the top longevity doctors. And the reason people biohack, ultimately, you might come in to lose the weight or do one thing. You will always want to live way longer than you're supposed to, and you'll want to become more conscious and happy. So all of my efforts are longevity and consciousness.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
It's really funny. I got my MBA at Wharton a while ago.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I'm doing an event, a very small private event with the Dalai Lama later this year.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Possibly. It'll be like 10 people and me.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Not just the stem cells. That's a part of it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Yeah, the wasabi method, it's a specific type of sound wave that goes in and creates micro bubbles that cause new nerves and new blood vessels to grow. And if you want more size, you get more blood vessels. But more nerves and more blood vessels are good. Oh, and it works on women too. I've done it on my girlfriend. And what does it do?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Oh, yeah. And... I did not even know that. I was a Silicon Valley tech dude. That I knew. Yeah, so I got my MBA there, but I was kind of failing out of my classes because my brain was cooked and I had toxic mold, brain damage, and all this stuff. So for me to pass my test, I would literally line up the smart drugs I was taking on the desk. I'm like, I'm not cheating. Like, if you dope...
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Well, you want more nerves and more blood vessels all around the vulva region. It's external only. Don't go inside with that modality.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Usually use a little bit of lidocaine. I don't use lidocaine anymore because you just get used to it. Well, how often are you doing it? maybe once every month or two when I get around to it. But normally you do it three or four times and you see like massive, like when I first did this, maybe six years ago, I'd get out of the shower.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And if you're a guy, you get out of the shower, you recognize yourself in the mirror and you kind of know like, you know, shower girl or all that stuff. And you just do a double take. You're like, that's not mine because it looks so different.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I'm like, try not to be a douche who's like, you know, bragging about that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
It does last a very long time.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Because you're talking about growing new blood vessels. And now we're going to get a little bit juicy. And this is part of heavily meditated. I write about it. One of the things that is a major thing variable for men is frequency of ejaculation.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Because every time a guy ejaculates, testosterone drops precipitously for 24 to 48 hours and a hormone called prolactin that most people don't know about goes up. Prolactin makes you tired and lazy and low testosterone makes you tired and lazy and fat. So every time we ejaculate, we're dropping testosterone and we're raising this other hormone.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And that's why we have a refractory period, because prolactin goes up over time. So when you're young, you can go over and over. And as you age, you get higher levels of prolactin. So it turns out the Taoists figured this out a long time ago and said, you want to live a long time, Based on how old you are, don't ejaculate too often, but have as much sex as you want.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
So I'm like, that sounds like bullshit. I'm going to go test this. And for a year, I published my happiness data and my ejaculation data and my frequency of sex and masturbation and all that in one of my books. And the Taoists are right. The equation for men is real. So based on that, the longevity frequency for Taoists is ejaculate... every 30 days or less, this is really hard to do.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Publishing a year of data is kind of embarrassing because there's times I only made three weeks and then oops. But what I found during one of them for 30 days, I'm like, we'll just try the edge of this, no stimulation whatsoever. So it's not that I'm not having intimate activities, it's just that I'm not getting any. And it shrunk very noticeably, like 20, 30%. I'm like, this is horrible.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
It's like a muscle that doesn't get work worked out. So there are ancient, these are Chinese exercises that will restore blood flow and volume and basically make it stronger. I did an episode with Montauk Chia, who's one of the top teachers of this kind of thing in Oman. I interviewed him and he talked about, you know, grab the, this and pulling it and slap it this way. Like, okay.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Or I just rely on technologies that do that. So if you enhance it and you keep using it, it'll stay. If you enhance it and then you just, you know, once every couple of weeks, it's going to go away. So it's a use it or use it thing like every other muscle in the body.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Here's the equation. And I also want to tie this back to entrepreneurs. I'll give you the equation first. It's age in years minus seven, divide by four.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And that's the number of days between ejaculations. So as you get older, it's longer and longer. And the reason for this is to keep your prolactin low and keep your testosterone high and probably some other, they'll call it young life energy or chi. Like you lose your chi when you ejaculate. But having relations with someone increases your chi.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
It's just that it grows and it grows and it grows and then you lose it. Only for men. The rules for women are different. And then for entrepreneurs, I've been teaching this for 10 years. The number of men, especially in their 30s, who have come up to me after conferences or just on stream and be like, I heard you talk about that. I tried it. And I started two new companies. I got a $30,000 raise.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Like, you know, people, Lance Armstrong couldn't talk about what he was doing because they didn't let him, but it would have been great if he was like, I won the Tour de France and I did A, B, and C so we could all learn. And I'm like, I would fail out of this. So here's my cognitive enhancers.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I finally got a girlfriend. Like their lives changed dramatically. And I didn't invent this. You know who did? Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich. He has a whole chapter on sexual sublimation, but the world is so uptight that we won't talk about it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And that's why in Heavily Meditated, there is a chapter saying of all the different ways you can access altered states that increase your performance and your consciousness and your awareness and your happiness, sex and tantra, it is one of the preeminent ways. And 20% of people report meeting God during orgasm at least once in their life.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
But their partners don't know because they're just laying there twitching, just like if they were on ketamine. Yeah. So why are we not talking about this as a necessary source of nourishment for the human soul and fuel for building things in the world that matter? Because creating a new life, which is what sex does, is not that different from creating a new company.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
It is the same energetic action that we do.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
But by any means necessary.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I'm not cheating because there's no rule against doping in business school, but it was the only way I graduated. And I've been on cognitive enhancers for 25 years and oh my God, why doesn't everyone do this?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
The thing that was the biggest mistake I made by far was becoming a vegan. It's taken me years to recover from that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And what happens is you feel great for six weeks. And this is because you're not getting the fatty acids or the proteins your body needs. So temporarily, your body makes more thyroid hormone so that you can have enough energy to go find an animal and eat it. Totally, yeah. But you don't do that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
so by then you're convinced i've got the glow i've got the vegan glow i feel so good so then you keep doing it and then you start getting worse energy and your skin doesn't work and you start getting massive joint pain and weird skin issues that comes from plant-based toxins mostly called oxalate and i wrote about this in the Bulletproof Diet, but I didn't weight it heavily enough.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
So as a raw vegan, I filled my body with razor sharp calcium crystals that caused all the joint pain, a lot of the neurological pain. I had to have the big toe on my right foot rebuilt after a yoga injury because of this problem. Getting razor-sharp calcium crystals out of our diet and out of our bodies is necessary if you're going to live to 180 or more years like I am.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
It's taken a long time to unpack that and get out of it, and now I understand how it works.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
But even with the Bulletproof Diet, I wrote about it and I minimize some foods like spinach and kale, but it turns out almonds and sweet potatoes, which I used to be a big fan of, I think sweet potatoes are better than white potatoes, but if you're eating very many of them, you're getting a meaningful dose of a toxin your body can't remove.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
So for me, I didn't do myself any favors with the vegan diet. And now I kind of doubled down on those Bulletproof Diet principles. And man, I am five and a half, 6% body fat. And I'm never hungry. And I'm lean. Have you seen the cover of the book?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
It's real. It's not Photoshopped. I didn't even dehydrate or do all that weird stuff. I literally woke up. I flew to Florida the night before. I woke up the next morning, took my shirt off in a studio, and we took the pictures. There was no prep whatsoever. I did push-ups before the shots. That was it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I'm not kidding you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Well... If you're sensitive to nightshades, which about a third of people are, you're going to get arthritis from eating white potatoes. I'm one of those people, by the way. My daughter isn't, my son is.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Because they're part of the nightshade family, along with tomatoes and eggplants and things like that. So this is a cause of rheumatoid arthritis and autoimmunity because our bodies can't handle that plant defense compound. So then you switch to sweet potatoes because they don't cause that problem. And you feel good on sweet potatoes and they're delicious. I love them and they have some nutrients.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Problem is they're higher in oxalate than white potatoes. So either way, you're screwed. You eat sweet potatoes, you get oxalate. You eat white potatoes, you get less oxalate, but you still get it and you get lactose. And I've been recommending forever, the safest source of starch is white rice.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
cassava high oxalate white rice not so i eat white rice as my carbs and i eat some fruit but it turns out raspberries are as high as spinach and oxalate you want to hear a cool story about raspberries yeah when i was recovering from my vegan time i went to the farmer's market
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
in uh in mountain view california and i would buy like 12 baskets of berries and i just eat a couple baskets of raspberries today because they're good for you and soon i had to pee like 25 times a day urgently have to pee like i'm gonna wet myself i'm like what is wrong i'm like 30 something and like i have to go to my longevity doc there was only one in the bay area at that time
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And he goes, I don't know what this is. I go to San Francisco, they stick a camera in a place where they don't go in men, in the front, not the back. And that was traumatic, oh my God. And he goes, I have no idea what it is. And I finally figured it out. The raspberries were causing it. I didn't know why, but now I know why.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Because when you eat foods high in these razor sharp calcium crystals, the crystals form in your urine and they cut your urethra. If you're a woman and you have UTIs all the time, right? You have even interstitial cystitis, step away from the raspberries and kale and spinach and sweet potatoes and almonds, and you might suddenly find that three days later, you don't have it anymore.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Blueberries are perfectly fine.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I am not a keto dieter. Some think I invented the keto diet. I did not. That was more Robert Atkins. But what I did do is I said, well... a clean keto diet with specific fats and no toxins, that's a cyclical diet, works really well. So I'll go into ketosis for a few days and then I'll go out, but I don't recommend unending periods of ketosis for most people, especially women.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And that was in all of my books, but sometimes people just want to simplify like keto's good, carbs are bad. So no, I eat a lot of blueberries. And I'll eat fruit and I'll eat rice. White rice. White rice.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Such a scam. In fact, I really pissed people off last week on Instagram. I said, if I had a choice between eating white flour from Europe and sweet potatoes, I would pick the white flour from Europe. Now, I am not a fan of gluten, but European wheat is much gentler than American wheat. It's a different species of wheat. It's a soft wheat versus a hard wheat.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And it's not sprayed with toxins like glyphosate the way it is here. If you give me a teaspoon of American flour, man, my gut is ruined for days. And I get pimples. It's horrible. and I get brain fog, but I can go to Europe and I can eat croissants all the time. I just have to say something really quickly. You believe in democracy, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
There are more Americans who eat croissants than French people who eat croissants. By the power of democracy, the French people need to change how they say the word.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Sorry, as a Canadian passport holder, which is a French speaking country.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I really truly believe that exercise would help me lose weight. I had three knee surgeries before I was 24 because my knee would just collapse from walking from the arthritis that I had. I really had an old person's body when I was young. And I'm like, I am not gonna let this happen anymore. So I went to the gym that time, 702 hours over 18 months.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
At the end of that, I hadn't lost any weight, but I'm like, at least I'm strong. So finally I must be rehabbed. I can like see my quads, like I'm safe now. And I did something really dangerous. I played laser tag. Remember laser tag?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And I squatted and I twisted and I blew my ACL and went back in front of the surgery. And I'm like, why? So my belief that exercise would make me thin was wrong, and my belief that more exercise was better was wrong. And today, we have 30 locations opening of Upgrade Labs, and I can prove it to you with university studies and your own results.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
You give me 15 minutes a week of cardio at my facilities, and it'll do six times better than an hour a day of spin classes.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
No, that's straight-up cardio training. We're using AI to exercise, and we're using a ton of recovery technologies. Because what really makes people change is brief, intense stimulus followed by profound recovery. So I use AI to give you the right stimulus, and it's a very small amount. And then AI to help you recover, to have the right recovery for what you did. And people transform.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And this is the stuff that I use to biohack myself.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
That was part of it. One is exercise doesn't make you lose weight. The other one was that more exercise would get more results. That is not true either. It's actually paradoxical. Over-training is a really serious thing for people who exercise every day. I had a couple friends over two months ago. They're both about my age, and they have much bigger shoulders than I do.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
That's probably because I had a tear in my shoulder that I've just rehabbed so I can put them back on. They also have big pot bellies and they're like, we never worked out this hard to be this fat. Like we're going to the gym five times a week and we're hitting it hard and we're maxing things out. And it's called over-training, dude.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
You have a cortisol belly and your testosterone's in the shitter because everyone's testosterone is low, men and women, because of microplastics and all the other stuff. So get on thyroid if you need it, which most people do. Get on testosterone, which most people need. And then work out every three days. And the other day, go to yoga class or go for a walk and watch your gut disappear.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
So less exercise, more recovery equals results. I did not understand that. And entrepreneurs, we're the worst people on earth at taking a break and recovering. So I use technology to let me recover faster than I'm supposed to. I'm like, hurry up, recover faster.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Yeah, food is 90% of body comp.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And then if you wanna put on muscle and be fit, you can do it in very small amounts of time. And this is not to say that moving is bad for you. I recommend a 20 minute walk every day, or if you don't have time for that, get a whole body vibration plate, do five minutes of that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Oh, absolutely.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
We can go there. Okay, good.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
What are you doing? When I was 26, I went into the doctor and I was very fortunate because I ran a longevity nonprofit to know the only guy in town who did this. And I'd sent my parents to him and then I went and he called me and said, Dave, I've got bad news. Your testosterone is lower than your mom's. I'm 26 years old. By the way, this is the case for all 26 year olds now.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I was just an early adopter of low testosterone, right? What was it at? What was the number? God, I don't remember at the time, but it was not good. This is 25 years ago or something. So I probably have it in a hard drive somewhere, but I went on testosterone to get my levels back up. And I went on thyroid because my thyroid was terrible.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I had Hashimoto's and we were just discovering Hashimoto's back then. So I remember the first time I got thyroid, I'm like, wow, I forgot I could, my brain worked like this. I was walking around in a fog all the time and I was cold all the time. And you see the outer parts of my eyebrows are thin. That's a sign of Hashimoto's. So yeah, you start shedding the outer part of your eyebrows.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I was been like that since I was in my early twenties. Cause I had, I lived in a house with toxic mold. I had brain damage from toxic mold that was driving a lot of my mental stuff. I had hormone disruption from chemicals, bad food, and toxic mold, which makes synthetic estrogen that makes you fat on 30% less calories. And by the way, for people saying that's bullshit, it's called ziralinone.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
You can look it up. It's real. So I had all this stuff going on. I didn't know. So yeah, I went on testosterone and I've been on testosterone since I was 26 years old, except for two years when I was developing the Bulletproof Diet to see what I could do with just diet. And what I found was if I did my best to get good sleep and to eat tons of fat, I could get my levels up to about 700.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Well, higher than 100 or... No, your total testosterone for guys should usually be around 1,000 to feel good. And that's where it would have been 30 years ago. So 700 is not a healthy number for most people. And your free testosterone needs to be above 20 to feel good and to just have your masculine stuff. So I've been on it, except for that time I couldn't get it high enough.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And testosterone has absolutely changed my life. And here's why. Testosterone drives dopamine levels in the brain. So if you're low on testosterone as a man or a woman, you'll be low dopamine. And what happens when you're low dopamine? Dopamine gives you a reward and pleasure for pursuing a goal. You don't get the reward if you get the goal. It's just the pursuit of it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
So if you're an entrepreneur and a business person, you're pursuing a goal and you need to have adequate dopamine to wake up and care about it. And if you've ever seen the movie Grumpy Old Men, that's a testosterone deficiency documentary.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Okay. When I was in business school, we had a whole class for a semester where the basic idea was to teach us that it was cheaper to spend a dollar telling people your product was high quality than it was to make a high quality product. And this is one of the problems in the world. Like, look at what's going on on Amazon and all this cheap stuff.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
That's what people are like when you're low T. And if you're 26 years old now and you're low testosterone like I was when I was 26, you don't have the vibe you're supposed to have. And there's nothing wrong with you if you're feeling anxiety or tiredness or depression.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
You simply have a hardware problem because your balls are not making enough testosterone because they were poisoned by your environment or you're not sleeping and you're eating the wrong stuff. So you can fix it. And a couple of weeks after you do it, Like, wow, this is great. I want to go to the gym. I'm doing stuff in my business again. Now I want to date. And it's like you get yourself back.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
It's critically important and you can measure it. It's not like it's witchcraft.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
It's different for men and women. The pellet works pretty well for women, but women need a much lower dose of testosterone. And a lot of people will think, well, women, it's all about estrogen. Women have four times more testosterone than estrogen. Estrogen is very potent. So you still need your testosterone. And it doesn't vary as much as it does for guys.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
My experience has been that you want to either inject or use a cream. because those are gonna give you the variability. I've used a pellet two times, and a lot of my hair fell out from that because a pellet will raise your levels and keep them high, and we need to cycle. So as of the last year, there are now two different oral forms of testosterone that are available.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I'm testing those out to see which ones I like.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I've injected for 20 years. It's not that big of a deal.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I have been using peptides for about 12 years. I read a big chapter in Superhuman, my longevity book on them, and they can work really, really well. It depends on your goals. There's hundreds of peptides. So many.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Yeah, you probably want to work with a functional medicine doctor, or if you're going to do it yourself, pick one or two that have specific outcomes you're looking for, and then do them for a month or two and see if you got the outcomes.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
So over the last two years, I haven't used very many peptides, but over the last two months, I've been playing around with some new ones like SLUPP332. I've been on that for three weeks or something. All the weight loss and like muscles and vasculature and stuff like that is not from peptides. It's from getting one gram of animal protein per pound of body weight and doing it consistently.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
The biggest shift I've made in the last three years that helped me lean out, I travel 50 to 70% of the time to come and be on shows like this. I'm on main stages in Dubai and all over the world. Constantly, yeah. So when you travel, you can't get enough protein. Restaurants are like, oh, here, it's a $50 meal and there's a little cube of protein. I'm like, I'll have six of those, thank you.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
so i just travel with protein and i order the largest steak i can get at every meal and once i keep my protein numbers up it's like i'm lean i have tons of energy and if you get one gram of animal protein per pound of body weight it'll raise your glp-1 levels similar to taking ozempic anyway
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
So if I made the world's best of something and there was a knockoff next to me, it's still gonna cost me a dollar to market the world's best and it's gonna cost them a dollar to market the world's crappiest with nice paint on it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I have used Ozempic one time because six years ago when, I'm a futurist really, and so I'm like, oh, this Ozempic thing's gonna be really big. So the guy who led the first trial on Ozempic for weight loss for non-diabetics, I had him on the show. So I injected the lowest dose that week so I could talk about it. Oh my God, I felt like I had morning sickness. It was terrible.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
i wouldn't want to be on that and since then i've published glp guidelines on my website here's what to do if you're going to be on a zempic so you don't get the bad things and this is my understanding about chemistry plus several doctors i've interviewed and bottom line is you have to force yourself to eat protein and you have to do heavy stuff for brief periods twice a week and take some mitochondrial enhancers and you can safely use a zempic to lose weight i see all these people really judgy people these are people haven't really been obese like i have
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
When you're fat, you will do anything to lose the weight. And every single day you sit down in your conference room and there's a plate of cookies in front of you and you're like, I'm not going to eat that cookie. And then the cookie is like, you're going to eat me. And you have this internal dialogue, which is depleting your willpower. And you're like, and you're drooling. And finally, it's fine.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I'll just eat half. And then afterwards, like, why am I such a bad person? I've done this so many times. I don't have that voice in my head anymore. The cookies have gone silent on me. I just don't even see them as food. And until I got to that point though, it's just a constant struggle.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And you're more tired when you're obese because your energy that should be going into your brain and your hormones, it's going into white fat cells. So losing weight is the most important thing you can do. It is deadly to be obese. So people think, but Ozimbic is dangerous. You know what's even more dangerous? Being fat. Stop being fat.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
So there is no issue whatsoever morally or anything else for using Ozempic. But if you use Ozempic and you don't keep your muscle mass, you're doing it wrong and you're harming yourself.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And since I believe in personal responsibility and that no one has a right to tell me what I can put in my body, And no one has a right to tell you what you can put in your body. It's your body. Right. That means you have a choice to use Ozempic and you have a choice to use it in a dumb way, same way you do to eat a Twinkie, right?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
But if you just do a couple things with Ozempic, you can safely lose a huge amount of weight. You might have to deal with all the extra skin that I have from when I was fat, but that's a great problem to have compared to being fat.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
So therefore we have this race to the bottom where everything's like something you would buy at a flea market. And I just have this belief from my own experience having all the diseases of aging before I was 30. chronic fatigue syndrome, brain fog, arthritis since I was 14. I weighed 300 pounds. The GI issues, high risk of stroke and heart attack on lab tests, prediabetes.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
As a matter of fact, I'm glad you asked about... Three weeks ago, I received my first vial of Rettrutride. I can never say that one right. This is the third generation GLP-1. And I'm using the very lowest dose of that once a week, 12.5 milligrams, that's three weeks in, no changes whatsoever. That's not enough to cause weight loss. That's enough to activate longevity pathways.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I'm all about using pharmaceuticals, natural compounds, lifestyle, lighting, magnetism, anything on earth to make my body recover faster and live longer. I don't judge pharmaceuticals. I'm like, what are the risks and what are the rewards? At very low doses, the signaling effects of the GLP-1 things, they reduce Alzheimer's, all kinds of risks go down.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I've been testing that, but I don't like how I feel on it. It makes me a little tired for two days after I take it. It is HeLa venom.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
It's a very low microdose, but it doesn't feel good when I do it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I don't know if I'll continue.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I might.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
These are like foundational biohacking tools.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I'm just kidding.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
So I have all this going on and I realized I don't give a crap if something is supposed to work. I only care if it does work. And in business, it's kind of the same thing, but it's more obvious.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
So if you have this religious belief that billboard ads are going to change the world for you, so you put a million dollars into billboard ads and you don't sell anything, you go, well, it's maybe because I didn't do it enough. So you put $10 million in and it still doesn't do anything, and then you're out of money.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Well, for our health, how many times do you go to the gym without getting very good results per minute? How many times you can go on a low-fat, low-calorie diet that you can't sustain no matter what? I've done all of those in my weight loss journey. So when it comes to making products, I am going to bet that people will spend a little bit more for stuff that actually works.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
People will pay for quality. Not perceived quality, but actual quality. They just have to feel it. So that was part of it. And then I also recognized that there was... There's a group of people who hadn't come together. So I ran a longevity nonprofit group in Palo Alto starting in the late 90s.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I was the only guy under 60 in the room because I was learning how to heal myself from people three times my age. Like my elders, the masters of longevity taught me all this stuff that became biohacking.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
A guy named Julian Whitaker was an example. Bruce Ames, who's still around. So I got to hang out with like the who's who from the 90s. People were writing the big books on nutrition. Barry Sears from The Zone, the Atkins family. So I'm getting mentored by all these people. So we have these longevity nuts, you could call them. Like everyone thought we were crazy. Like it's not possible to do that.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And then on the other side of the road, my brain was failing, and I'm at a company that split three times on the NASDAQ in 1998, was worth $36 billion, and I co-founded a part of that company. And my career is going nuts. My brain is totally cooked. I can't remember things, and I'm hiding it from people, and I keep getting promotions, and it was just kind of this hellish but exciting experience.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
uh exciting time in my career where there's this deep fear that i have the accelerator pegged all the way to the floor and i'm slowing down every day and i don't know what to do so i got into this cognitive enhancers i talked about before and the guy who ran the world's only newsletter in the 80s on that became a mentor so all of a sudden i have the elixir of brain juice that works and i know how it works and i've studied intensely
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And I've worked with the longevity people. And Mike on my board of directors, who's 88 years old, has more energy than I do, calls me at 1130 at night, all excited and ready to do stuff. And I'm like, how does he do that? I want that. And I know it's possible. And I saw older people get younger. I just didn't wait till I was old to see it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I got to see it when I was young because my body was failing. So, okay, now I got old people wanna become young. I've got cognitive enhancement, right? These guys don't talk to each other. And then you've got, I went to the gym 90 minutes a day, six days a week for 18 months straight. Just beat myself up. I will lose this weight no matter what. I never lost a pound. I still had a 46 inch waist.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I was just stronger at the end of that. So now I got my bodybuilders who are some of the best biohackers in the world. And then you talk with the professional athletes and like astronauts and then all the nutrition people. And I've been a vegan, I've been a raw vegan. I've tested all the limits of the diets and understand how all that stuff works because I had to, because no one could tell me.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And I wrote a major, major book, almost a million copies of it sold. What was the first book?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
That was called The Bulletproof Diet.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
It sold even like 600,000 copies in Japan of all places.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
It actually introduced in the first chapter, here's lectins, which became a big thing. Here's clean keto and here's intermittent fasting. Like those are massive trends. Totally. That have taken off and it made collagen into a billion dollar industry category. Collagen. And it made MCT into a billion dollar industry category and functional coffee into a half a billion dollar category from one book.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
and from one movement. And the reason for that isn't because I'm good at marketing. It's because I know how to make things that work.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Air One actually was the first company that carried Bulletproof coffee when I was at Bulletproof.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And they used to make Bulletproof coffee ice cream at their original location. I love Air One.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
People who are older will understand this. Well, if you wake up- Like me or older than me? Older than you, unless you had a really good longevity program. Yeah. There comes a time for most people, if they're not doing the longevity stuff that I teach now, where you wake up and you're like, my body hurts. I feel like crap. My brain doesn't work.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I have a wet blanket on my head and I wake up and I don't like how I look in the mirror and I don't have any vibe, any drive. I'm just tired and I'm gonna slog through the day and I'm gonna do it again and again. I experienced that. at a very young age. And like, I'm just gonna use willpower, but willpower is a function of how much energy your body can make.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
So having to go through and repair all that stuff really taught me how to talk with people about what they don't share with other people. And one of the things that really touched me during the process of learning how to reverse all that is I raised my first venture capital round for Bulletproof. It was something like $8 million. And it's from Sand Hill Road, BC.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And one of the guys who ended up on the board, who I'd gotten to know because I worked for that firm, He wrote a Medium article and I was shocked when I read it. This guy came to me when I was working at the firm and just, why are you putting butter in your coffee? Like you're an idiot. And it explained why he tried it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And when he wrote that post after they funded the company, he said, 60 days after I met Dave, I sat down in my BMW in the parking lot in Sand Hill Road and I cried. I'm like, what? Venture capitalists don't cry. They don't have souls. Like, I don't understand this. And I'm just joking. My friend does have a soul. And he said, here's why.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
He said, my entire adult life, I've had crippling fatigue and brain fog, and I've never told a soul anything. And 60 days after I started doing what Dave said, I went through the entire day without losing my energy even one time. And it felt so hopeless and so impossible that I was crying because I've never experienced a day of full energy in my adult life and no one ever knew. And you look around
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
You know, why did Biohacking take off? There's a lot of people who are quietly desperate, including entrepreneurs. We're some of the worst, right? Probably the worst. Yeah, we burn the candle at both ends and in the middle. It's not like when I was learning all this longevity stuff, I was just hanging out. I had a demanding tech career.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I started Bulletproof when I was a VP at a publicly traded computer security company. I literally am a computer hacker.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
so i'm working all day at a high pressure exec job flying around the world and doing stuff and then at night i'm blogging and i'm building this little company and my whole point of starting it i didn't even build a list i just wanted five people to not go through all that that i went through like if five people read my blog it'll have made the world a better place and that's my win this is almost like a non-profit activity and when i said well i want some coffee that doesn't make me tweak like
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Does anyone else want to try it? It was literally a desire to share. But along the way, how did I come up with this Bulletproof Coffee thing?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Absolutely.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I raised my first round when I was doing $27 million in revenue. I bootstrapped it until then. Wow. And my original seed capital was $50,000. And I got that by an investment bank flying me around the world to teach hedge fund managers how to raise their IQs.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I was a top expert in this field because I had studied intensely every night for four hours a night to save my life.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Surprisingly, maybe. So if we go even further back in my career.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
You see the tattoo here?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
You know what that is?
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
It's the caffeine molecule.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
When I was 20, now I'm exposing my true age.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
I'm 52. 52, okay.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
The first product ever sold over the internet had that molecule on it. It was sold out of my dorm room. The first e-commerce on the planet. We didn't have the word e-commerce yet. The web browser wasn't invented yet. And people say, that's bullshit. I'm like, no, go to Entrepreneur Magazine. There's an article of me weighing 300 pounds, wearing a double extra large t-shirt with that molecule on it.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
And they're saying, hey, everybody, this kid's selling t-shirts over the inner something or another because the internet wasn't a thing. People mostly knew about AOL.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Around 1993. Wow.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
In fact, that fat picture on Instagram is from Entrepreneur Magazine.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
Yeah.
Habits and Hustle
Episode 451: Dave Asprey: Marketing Secrets That Built a $20 Billion Biohacking Industry
So I did have some of that, but I spent time building internet infrastructure. You go back to when cloud computing didn't have a name, the provision on demand, your pay-as-you-go model that's just part of everything we do. The first shipping instance of that was at the company where I helped to start part of the company, and we beat Marc Andreessen by one day.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Yeah.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Why is my cat not here? And I go in and she's eating my lunch.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
You need between 0.8 and 1 gram of protein per pound of body weight. So I weigh 200 pounds, and I'm about 7% body fat. And that means I need about 200 grams of protein a day.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Yeah, it's ridiculous. As a guy who was the fat computer hacker from the first Jurassic Park... It's totally ridiculous. And in order to do that, if you're obese like I was, you might say, well, if I weighed 300 pounds, I had 100 pounds of fat. You really only need 200 grams of protein. You can subtract the extra fat from the number. But 200 grams of protein.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
And protein isn't all the same. And this is something that the big food companies are trying to tell us. Cricket protein or gluten is protein. There's a company making keto cookies that are all protein. They're just gluten and canola oil. That is not food. So a while ago, the story was, oh, all calories are the same, so you can drink this high fructose corn syrup, it's just calories.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
As long as you keep your calories low, you can drink a Diet Coke and a Snickers bar, they cancel each other's out. It doesn't work like that. Protein's the same way. So different proteins send different signals to the body. And there's something called amino acid availability score. And it turns out that animal proteins score much higher than plant-based proteins.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
And I say this as a former vegan, a former raw vegan, And you just cannot get enough protein from plants unless you're doing heavy industrial processing of the plants. And that comes at a cost.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
But even then, the highest quality plant-based protein powders don't hold a candle to dairy protein, which is vegetarian, or egg protein, which is vegetarian, or sort of the king of proteins is beef or buffalo or bison. As a vegan, I had a problem with this because I was a vegan. I was in Tibet at a monastery and Tibetan monks love to argue.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
They're trained since they're about eight years old or they have an eight-year-old sitting on the ground surrounded by older kids standing up, all arguing at the same time, doing these like aggressive things. And it's to teach you to be calm in the face of arguments so that you can still be at peace. And it's beautiful to watch. So I knew this. And so I'm kind of teasing the head llama.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
I said, well, you tell me no killing, but you have a yak skin on your prayer pole. So I think you're a hypocrite. And he starts laughing and he looks at me, he goes, one death feeds everyone. And I'm like, mind blown! Because I had been a vegan until I went to Tibet and I realized I cannot be a vegan in Tibet because there's just very little food.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
And if there's some yak butter tea or there's a little bit of meat, you just eat it because there's just not enough food. So I really thought about it. And that led me to think about deaths per calorie. And as a guy who's built a regenerative farm on Vancouver Island and raised all of my own animals for most of the last eight years, I will tell you that a cow will feed you for an entire year.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
And if it's grass fed and from a local farmer, no other animal died unless the cow stepped on a frog. I mean, it is literally one death. And if the cow was treated with respect and ethically, then you're killing fewer animals than an industrial plant protein.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Because when they do those, the tractor comes through and it chops up every creature that's there, including the bunnies and the mice and the butterflies and all the ugly ones like worms that no one likes that are important for life. So I feel really clean about it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
But the most important thing that I can say, if you choose to eat animal protein, which I do, is that practice gratitude before you eat. I believe because of my shamanic training, because of all the spiritual work that I do,
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
that humans our energetic field as a species made a sacred agreement with the animals that we've domesticated and they come here to nourish us in exchange for our gratitude so if you're going to eat meat you practice gratitude because that's the deal we made and if you disrespect the animal and you're eating industrial meat and you're eating it mindlessly, I don't think that's a good practice.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
But I do think it's ethical to eat meat because I'm killing fewer lives when I eat beef than when I eat plant-based protein. And since that nourishes me better, which gives me stronger energy and stronger bones, and it gives me more energy to put back into the world, including building better soil via farming of animals, I feel like it's a good deal and it's within integrity for me.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Birds are not that, they're all dinosaurs. So they're less like us. And the fat that's present in birds is similar to soybean oil. It's a lot of omega-6 that causes inflammation. And you would know this. If you're in India and you're not feeling well, your grandmother's gonna give you white rice and ghee, which is clarified butter.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
In the US, you get saltines and margarine or something and it doesn't work very well. But the reason is that ghee, that saturated fat, is very nourishing for you and that you actually need that. You don't get it from a chicken. And also, one chicken, to get the amount of protein, I'd eat a chicken a day. I'm killing 365 chickens a year. That doesn't feel very good.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
In addition to that, real chickens, the kind that I grow on my farm, take nine months to mature. And their fat is rich and yellow and full of vitamins, even though it's not the best kind of fat. But the chickens they're eating at the store take six weeks to get that big because they've been modified and bred to have these incredibly large breasts and they're terribly mistreated.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
So unless a chicken is pasture raised and a heritage breed, at which point it's not affordable. They're terribly expensive to raise. Chickens exist to make eggs. Eggs, if you're not allergic, are really a good source of fat and protein. And when you eat eggs, you want to cook the whites and leave the yolk runny. And then you get the most nutrients that way.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Are you plant based to the exclusion of dairy?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
And it's working for you. And if you're from India, you probably have the genes that are going to support that much better. And so if you look at what your great grandmother ate, that's going to be an indication of what you can handle. And if you look at you, your skin is really good. And that's unusual when most people go vegan because they eat a lot of industrial processed seed oils.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
So if you're eating a diet that agrees with your body, and I totally support doing that, then what you want to do is you want to make sure that you're getting complete amino acids. And you can do it from rice and beans, but here's the issue. To get enough protein... It's definitely hard.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
It's like 300 grams of carbs to get 20 grams of protein. So then your best bet for plant-based proteins to have the highest amino acid score, it's actually hemp protein with the fat removed because hemp oil isn't particularly good for you. So then what you end up doing is saying, okay, I'm going to do that, and I feel good. I've also helped a lot of vegans.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
In fact, this was at David Wolf's vegan conference. I explained the virtues of ghee, where no animals die to make ghee, and ghee helps to escort the nutrients from plants into the body, so you make better use of the plants. So sometimes adding a tablespoon of ghee a day gives you a healthier skin glow, and it feels more nourishing. And people can choose to do that or not choose to do that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
And people get mad because I tease vegans. Dude, I was a vegan. It's teasing, guys. It's not a disrespectful thing. In my case, it actually harmed me. And some things like spinach, kale, even raspberries and almonds are very high in oxalic acid, which I write about in the book. and it causes crystals to form. 70% of kidney stones are from plant-based compounds, not from eating meat and beer.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
30% are from meat and beer. And so you can overdo either direction, right? So I want people to say, choose the right plants when you're plant-based. And I would consider, if I was plant-based, adding hemp-based protein powder, even though it is a processed food, it's going to be a processed food that has the best amino acid score that you can get.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Or if hypnotism is real? But what's inside a black hole?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Dairy milk has been a part of human food for at least 5,000 years, and it's a convenient way to not kill an animal and to have it continuously produce fat and protein, which are the hard things for humans to get enough of, because carbs are relatively abundant in nature. What do you do?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Well, normally you would just drink milk but the milk we would drink was from a breed of cows that makes A2 milk and they ate grass and that works well with our biology. The kind of milk that you get now is from cows that are bred to eat grain and corn and soy and that milk has the wrong kind of fat and it has a kind of protein called A1 protein that's very inflammatory.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
So a lot of people who can't drink milk, which include me, because it messes up my gut royally, it just makes me stupid. Actually, my brain swells up from it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Me too. It's very similar. So sometimes you can handle A2 milk, but raw A2 milk is how we used to drink it. And in many states, it's still illegal. Yeah. Why the government thinks it has a right to tell you what you're allowed to eat, I don't know. They don't have that right. So it doesn't matter if they make it illegal. They didn't have the right to make it illegal.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
So therefore, it's not illegal in the world that I live in. Then again, if you're selling it, they might still try to arrest you. Then you got to go to court. But here's the deal. Raw milk for many people is very, very healing. And for some people, whey protein, especially if you're vegetarian but not vegan, it's a source.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Just get grass-fed whey protein because the animals are treated better and because it's a higher quality nutritional product. But let's assume you're not going to drink cow's milk because for a lot of people it just doesn't work, including me. I don't touch it.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
butter and ghee usually are acceptable especially ghee won't trigger allergies and mucus like that for almost anyone well what about the fake milks right so these are all industrial products unless you make it yourself and what they figured out with almond milk was oh we can take leftover parts of almonds and you know the ones that are broken and unsightly and we can use those to make
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
milk and it's just a few almonds and some canola oil and some high fructose corn syrup some flavorings and we blend it up and we sell it for like eight dollars as a health food product it's not a health food product so almond milk is high in phytic acid that sucks minerals out of your bones you have to take more minerals and it's also high in oxalates which are the things that are causing kidney stones and things that are causing gout and joint pain when you wake up even
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
If you have really bad skin and you're eating a ton of these high oxalate foods like almond milk and kale smoothies and all, this can be why because it's making tiny razor sharp calcium oxalate crystals in your skin that are coming out. So I don't recommend almond milk. Also, if you're a vegan for animals, the number of bees, about a third of all bees die pollinating almonds every year.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
It is not a particularly clean product. So then we say, well, oat milk. That is the biggest scam on the planet right now. It raises your blood sugar as much as drinking a Coke. It is not a health food, and it usually has glyphosate, and it's high in phytic acid that sucks minerals out of your body. And I know you might not like hearing this, but... Do the math.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
There's a tablespoon of oats blended into a bunch of water and you spent six bucks on that. Like, are you dumb? Right. It's not a good move. Right. So what should you drink? There's two kinds of milk that are okay. One of them is macadamia milk, which is really expensive and you have to make it yourself because macadamias have the right kinds of oil in them.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
But the other one that's abundant and healthy is coconut milk. So if you're going to do it, use coconut milk.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
I know, right?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Here's the problem, though. If you say, okay, I don't like the taste of coconut milk, and I'm with you on that.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
Yeah, that's really the key. You don't need to drink a plant milk. It's a made-up product that you don't have a need for, but... If you say I'm going to do one of these other things, you're spending a lot of money, you're getting anti-nutrients, you're getting mostly water, and you're usually getting a toxic burden. So like why am I doing this again?
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
The thing that milk has that's most important is it has protein. And the second most important is it has good fats. When you have a replacement milk, even coconut milk, there is no protein. So the coconut yogurt you like, it doesn't work because it doesn't have protein. So you have to take that and add whey protein or add scoops of maybe hemp protein if you're doing plant-based.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
But you've got to add a whole bunch of protein to it because... Normal yogurt has that. Most people tolerate grass-fed yogurt pretty well. I still don't. I can't touch cow's milk unless it's ghee for the most part, or I can do some butter. But if I was to have, you know, two tablespoons of regular milk, it messes me up. My gut's wrong. It's just not right. So that's an immune response.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
Jay’s Must-Listens: 5 Nutrition Experts on the Foods to Eat (and Avoid) to Improve Digestion and Stop Bloating (Ft. Dr. Casey Means & The Glucose Goddess)
So I just want to tell you, you're not getting protein in your plant milks and you're getting stuff you don't want in your plant milks. So just don't do it.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I got the scan, and when I walked back into his office, he was kind of white, and he looked at me and he said, Dave, I thought there was nothing wrong with you. When I see your brain scan, he said, inside your brain is total chaos. I don't know how you're standing here in front of me.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So the most energy to fear, the second most to food. And in some of my books, I write about studies, a third of the average person's thoughts are about burritos. Yeah. It's what am I going to eat next? So a third of the thoughts in your conscious brain are food, food, food. That's just your mitochondria yanking your chain because of nutrient deficiencies or because of toxins.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So fear, food, fertility, that's kind of dark. But the next one is the most important one. And it's friend. Right. And friend is all life is wired to support its own species and the species around it. And all of these are automated systems that happen before you can think. And the final F word is forgiveness. And I use that for humans in particular, but it really, it's evolution.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
All life is designed to improve itself, to become stronger, to become faster, to evolve. And the way humans do it, it's via forgiveness because forgiveness lets you put less energy into fear. So you have more energy for food. You eat food the right way. You have more energy for, I'm going to call it fertility, but it's really intimate love, which is a source of nourishment.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And now that you're not wasting energy on fear and on being hungry and on feeling unloved, you have so much energy for your community that now you have a purpose in the world. And you have energy after that because your community is now nourishing you. That you have so much energy left to grow and evolve and transform and transcend. That's why biohacking is so important. Because...
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133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
At first, how do we have more energy to fill all these buckets in order? Yeah. And then how do we reallocate the energy more effectively across the buckets? And heavily meditated, my new book is about what everyone wants. You might enter biohacking because like me, you need to lose 100 pounds or because you had crippling brain fog.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
But once that's solved, you go, you know, I think I want to live longer. Yeah. But then you go, I don't want to live longer unless I'm happy. So biohacking is ultimately about consciousness and longevity. You will always end up with these two as your primary goals, no matter if you're starting with my knee hurts all the time. Yeah, it's happiness. Yeah.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And happiness is hard, but we understand so much about what to do. Yeah. Along with learning from the masters of longevity, I was able to start the biohacking movement because in my mid-20s, I was so sick, I hung out in one of the first anti-aging groups in Palo Alto, a nonprofit, and they asked me to run it. I was the only guy under 60 in the room, and we brought in the luminaries in the field.
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133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Yeah. to come and present every month about a mile from Stanford in Palo Alto. And so I learned from these masters. And I'm like, wait, the things that make old people young make young people powerful, but no young people will come to this thing. I'm four minutes from Google's headquarters, and no Googlers will ever show up. So I thought, I have a branding problem.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And I'm walking around remote parts of Tibet, And just meditating and thinking like biohacking, that's the word. It's about what I do as a computer hacker. I take control of systems I don't fully understand. Because I can't see in them yet because I don't own them yet. I'm going to take control of my system because my doctor won't help me lose 100 pounds.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
It was chemically induced toxic mold brain damage that different toxins or nutrient deficiencies cause problems in the brain. All driven by this mold toxicity. Well, by mold and MTHFR, which makes mold worse. It literally just blew my mind. Oh, there's more.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Working out for 18 months, six days a week didn't help me lose any weight at all. And trying wasn't the thing. Believing something works wasn't the thing. I just made this this vow. I am going to measure results I'm only gonna do what works and I don't care if it's supposed to work.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Gary, it was an honor to get to interview you on The Human Upgrade and an even bigger honor to be on your show. I've been watching all the things you're sharing. I just love it when you talk about MTHFR, which has been a big part of my biohacking journey as well. So kudos for just teaching millions of people the stuff that matters.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I'll try the obvious things That's why I started out going to the doctor taking antibiotics going on a low-fat low-calorie diet and over exercising Well when that didn't work, all right fine. I'll go to Tibet. I think meditation is bullshit right to be honest at the time I'm a computer science guy But maybe thousands of years of tradition, maybe they're not all dumb. Maybe I'm just arrogant.
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133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So I became just deeply curious and I learned about acupuncture. I learned about meditation. I went to Peru in 1999 and I asked for ayahuasca and they looked at me and they said, you're white. Yeah, I know. And today I don't actually recommend ayahuasca. There's much safer molecules for altered states unless you're on a very specific path. Ketamine.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Ketamine is much safer and less spiritual risk and less medical risk. And I'm not opposed to ayahuasca. Like I said, I did it in 1999. But it wasn't a tourist business then and it wasn't being used to target wealthy people and sort of manipulate them the way it is today. But all these things were not what I thought was going to work. I was desperate because I was miserable. I tried being wealthy.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
When I was 26, I made $6 million. These were pre-Biden dollars. Yeah. So that was real money. And there's like 2 billion today. Yeah, yeah. I made and lost it before I was 30. I was an entrepreneur magazine for selling the first thing ever sold over the Internet when I was 23. I tried fame. I tried getting married early. I tried not being lonely. None of those made me happy.
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133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And I just realized I got to get my energy back. I can make my brain work. I need my power back.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And then I need to reallocate the power so that I can have the opposite of those efforts. What do you think the opposite of fear is? happiness or safety? It's interesting. Different people have different answers to it. And after talking with a lot of people and considering it, some people say love, some people say safety.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
in my world it's peace and if you have peace you have safety if you have peace love can flourish so the opposite of being afraid isn't just safety it's more than safety it's a sense of deep peacefulness and this comes from studying lots of different spiritual lineages and Safety is a state you can measure with neuroscience.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
You can measure it looking at your catecholamines, looking at your adrenal levels, looking at your cortisol levels, looking at all kinds of things like the amount of microsweat, something called galvanic skin response. And strangely, you can train yourself to consciously change your state of peacefulness.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
You can do it through meditation and mindfulness. It's a very slow process. It takes 20 years to be able to get to the advanced states of doing an hour a day. I started 40 years of Zen because I didn't have 20 years to do this. I was kind of miserable. So 40 years of Zen is in Seattle. It takes five days. And after five days, you have the same brain states of an advanced Zen meditator.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
It changes everything when you realize, okay, I can turn on peace moments. You can do it through neurofeedback. You can do it through breath work. You can do it through various kinds of biofeedback or through heart rate variability. Most people know about that from wearing our rings and our whoops and whatever. I actually have two different rings, the ultra-human and aura on right now.
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133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Yeah, I'd say the three that are most reliable, Whoop, UltraHuman, and Aura. And UltraHuman's a new entrant, but I think I like it better than Aura, even though I was an advisor to Aura many years ago.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I was also the CTO of the first company to get heart rate from the wrist back in 2008, the stuff that your Apple Watch does today or that the Whoop does. So I've been involved in this, how do I get the signal off the body so I can hack it kind of thing. Right. But going through all that stuff, the peacefulness thing was most important. And it's a trainable state.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And I know the inhibitors to peacefulness. And it's the stuff that you and I talk about all the time. It's toxins from your environment. It's lack of nutrients. It's lack of methylation. Something is stopping the hardware from working.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I remember back when I was 30, I was going to Wharton Business School. I'd already made and lost millions. And I started failing out of my classes. And I thought, God, there's something wrong with me. Maybe I'm not as smart as I think I am. I'm dumber than my classmates. Maybe I'm just not trying hard enough. But I know I'm trying. And I know I'm smart. But I just couldn't bring it. Brain fog.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
It was brain fog. So I went to Dr. Daniel Amon's clinic. I read his first book. And I got a brain scan. And I remember the psychiatrist in Palo Alto there. He looked at me like a tech bro wants Adderall. Like, we know this one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't want Adderall. So I got the scan. And when I walked back to his office, he was kind of white.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And he looked at me and he said, Dave, I thought there was nothing wrong with you. And when I see your brain scan, I'll never forget the words. He said, inside your brain is total chaos. Wow. You have the best camouflage I've ever seen. I don't know how you're standing here in front of me. Really? And I almost felt like crying because finally a doctor believed me.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And at that moment, I'm like, thank God I have a hardware problem. I don't have a moral failing. I thought it was something wrong with me. It was chemically induced toxic mold brain damage. Wow. And today I sit on Dr. Amon's board of directors. Wow. And he has proven conclusively that different toxins or nutrient deficiencies cause problems in the brain. Oh, my God.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I want to go down that road so bad. Well, the connection between toxicity and feeling a sense of peace is dramatic. So I had so much anxiety and fear that I didn't even recognize because it was my constant state in my teens and 20s. I just thought everyone was that way.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Well, by mold and MTHFR, which makes mold. Or elimination, yeah. Right? And then constant cravings. I didn't know the difference between hunger and cravings because I only felt cravings. I remember ending a meeting when I was at a big tech company where I made all that money. And it was $11.45. And I just looked at people and I said, guys.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I am so hungry, I'm gonna kill one of you and eat you if we don't continue this in the cafeteria, right? And that's a craving. And hunger's peaceful. It's like, you know, I should probably eat in the next day or two, but I'm fine either way. And my first fast and, you know, the Bulletproof Diet was the first big intermittent fasting book more than 10 years ago now.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And I wrote that after I hired a shaman to drop me off in a cave all by myself. Because I knew I ate if I was lonely. And I knew that I ate if I was just feeling this sense of craving. So like a loneliness thing. And I was terrified of being hypoglybitchy or hangry because I knew I was an asshole.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
If I was hungry. So if I'm by myself in a cave, I'm going to deal with my loneliness. I'll have no food. And if I get angry, I'll yell at the walls. Right. And I did this. And after four days of not eating, I had so much energy that I climbed to the wrong mountain to meet the shaman to pick me up. I ended up walking 10 miles in the desert with felt so good.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And I just realized I am not going to die if I'm without food. And I broke that thing. And so now I've learned how to deal with fear. I've learned how to deal with food where my body no longer believes I'll die if I don't eat. I know I have at least 60 days of not eating before I'll die. So fear, food, and oh my God, if we talk about the other F word there. We are nourished by feeling safe.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
We're nourished by eating food and we're nourished through intimacy. And I realized I haven't studied this. So I studied that, including trying to disprove a Taoist equation around frequency of ejaculation and longevity for men. And I published the data in one of my books.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And it turns out that every time a man ejaculates for 24 to 48 hours, his testosterone drops precipitously and his prolactin levels rise. And prolactin makes you tired and unmotivated and low testosterone makes you tired and unmotivated. So, oh my gosh. Frequency of lovemaking is good for you. Ejaculating too often during lovemaking is going to deplete you.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Just like they've been saying for 10,000 years in traditional Chinese medicine and in Tantra and all these things. Yeah. So I studied all that. And these are all mitochondrial imperatives. So it's about, okay, do my mitochondria feel safe in the world? That's peace. Do they feel safe if there is or isn't calories right now?
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133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And do they feel safe whether or not I'm frequently having sex to full completion? And the reality is all of those were dysregulating me. And when I trained my mitochondrial networks to be peaceful in all of those states, I became kind and peaceful.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I stopped having cravings and worrying about food and I became a much better lover.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
It was a spiritual journey. And I was working on mold at the same time. So I had realized something was going on. And the reason I was attending this nonprofit group for longevity
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
was because they were the only people who had tools that helped me, not knowing it was mold, not knowing it was MTHFR, not knowing the weaknesses that my biology had that I thought were moral weaknesses, but they would teach me stuff. This was the first group to bring coconut oil into the U.S.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
after 30 years of no one importing it because we had the first study on Alzheimer's and ketones and just coconut oil. That's what inspired me to add the C8 MCT into Bulletproof Coffee. But the butter from Bulletproof Coffee, that came from walking around Mount Kailash, the holiest mountain in the world, and having yak butter tea, and it restored my mitochondrial function.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I'm like, what just happened? And so I have the spiritual side and the longevity side that were inspiring me. And the name for biohacking came to me on the side of Mount Kailash.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Even collagen, which I made collagen a billion-dollar industry. And- I had injured my knees so severely in Nepal that I couldn't walk across the street without two trekking poles. And I had six days to recover before I walked around Mount Kailash. Wow. Halfway to Mount Kailash, I'm at this little restaurant on a dirt road, and they're cooking the food over yak dung.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And I asked a Chinese friend who I'd met on the road, can you read this menu? I'm just looking for some collagen because I know from my longevity work, I need collagen to fix my knees, but I don't have any. And he said, well, this one says pig's ears. So I ordered it and I got a bowl of about 18 cold boiled pig's ears. The most horrible thing I've experienced in a long time.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And I said, can I have some soup? So I would like warm them up in the soup. And the next day I could walk because I just needed the building blocks to make coffee. Right. So you fast forward a few years and I've got Bulletproof Coffee. I have nothing to do with Bulletproof. My new coffee company is called Danger Coffee. And it's truly mold free and it has trace minerals added at therapeutic doses.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Wow. Danger Coffee is my new one. But at the time it was Bulletproof.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And butter MCT oil. I knew it worked because I tested a thousand recipes when I got back to Silicon Valley. And years later, I gave $50,000 to Dr. Gerald Pollack. Have you ever interviewed him? Do you know who he is? Have you heard of Exclusion Zone Water? Yes. This is the man who discovered exclusion zone water at the University of Washington.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And what exclusion zone water is, is a fourth phase of water. And your body makes exclusion zone water by drinking regular water. And then your body holds it up against water. fat molecules that are your cell membranes and exposes it to 1200 nanometer light. That's called body heat. Wow.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So body heat plus water plus fat equals a special form of water that allows ATP to form, that allows proteins to fold. Without easy water, your body doesn't work. Sunlight makes easy water. Not deuterium depleted water. No, it doesn't need to be deuterium depleted. That's... there's evidence for deuterium. It's also, unless you're a billionaire dying of cancer, it's just not worth it.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I've, I've gone down the deuterium rat hole. Um, it spent a lot of money on it. It's just not, it's not a meaningful thing. And, and the average thing of all the things you can move is not deuterium. Okay. So this exclusions on water, um, Well, the research I funded showed that when you expose water to different types of fats, you get different amounts of exclusion zone water.
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133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
The two fats that created the most exclusion zone water were C8 MCT oil and butter oil. And this is why you have to blend butter and MCT in your danger coffee in order to get exclusions on water. This is why people talk about drinking vegetable juice. That's also exclusions on water. It just probably fills some toxins you might not want.
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133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So what you end up finding is, wait, all of this revolves around mitochondria because they need the exclusions on water. So these Tibetans drinking their yak butter tea They didn't have the story about mitochondria. They had a different story about Tibetan science, but the results were it improves brain function, improves performance. And now we know why it works.
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133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
We also know why so many other biohacks like red light therapy and infrared light therapy work. They're affecting water in cells, which affects mitochondrial function. Yeah. Mitochondria work better. Red light and chromophores. Yeah. Right. So if they work better, now you have more energy to deal with fear. Now you have more energy to say, I'm going to change my diet.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Now you have more energy to say, I'm going to work on my relationship. And now you have more energy for your community.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
It's a lot easier to meditate when your mitochondria work. And this isn't just a story. At 40 Years of Zen, we've had more than 2,000 people come through a five-day program to increase their IQ, increase their peacefulness, let go of their triggers and all of that.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
If I let them eat whatever they normally eat, they can only do so much of this intense meditation with a computer helping you. Until they just hit the wall. You're like, I can't do anymore. I'm done. If I give them the right diet and I get some ketones going and I blend butter and MCT oil, even in decaf coffee, two and a half times more meditation before they're tapped out. Wow.
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133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
That's how important this is. Wow.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
In order to increase my mitochondria? Well, this is going to sound like I'm a broken record, but if you were to wake up in the morning and you were to have some sodium in water, you can have electrolytes too. I recommended this for years. It is life-changing to increase sodium. There's all kinds of reasons we can go into for that.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So you have some salt water in the morning instead of regular water. Now hydration goes up. Your brain works better in multiple studies. A gram of sodium is great. It better have some magnesium and potassium and things in it. So you do that. And then you take, it doesn't have to be a lot, a little bit of ghee or butter and some MCT oil. And for that, more is better unless you get disaster pants.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And you blend it. And you have to blend it for 20 seconds. You can do it with tea. You can do it with coffee. So take your hot coffee, put it in the blender, which I remember at your biohacking events, they blended the coffee. It drove me crazy for years. Like if I just eat a stick of butter and drink some coffee, it should work, but it doesn't.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And the reason is that when you blend it, you're making the water into exclusions on water. And with Danger Coffee, we've added a large dose of trace minerals and electrolytes that's in the coffee itself. So when you brew it, you're getting a therapeutic dose of 50 different trace minerals. So that improves when you blend it and you drink it and your body's like, oh, yes.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And it's saying yes via that intuitive sense that happens before you have an emotional reaction or a thought. And the intuition is the body says, this is the water I need. And these are the minerals I need. Thank God. And you just like want it at this deep level. And it tastes like always tell people to hydrate and mineralize first thing in the morning. Yes. So that's how I do it, is those things.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And then you don't need to eat for a long time after that. And some people, especially young exercise buffs, they get so triggered when I say, you're still fasting if you have some butter and MCT oil. They say, but there's calories. In the studies, the mice only had water. Mice don't have espresso machines or they would add espresso. Right. Yeah.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
The reason that you can have some fat during a fast and it won't break the fast. And I wrote a whole book called Fast This Way to correct some misperceptions about fasting, particularly over fasting. So I've gone deep on the science on this. When you're fasting, your mTOR levels do not rise. And mTOR is a beneficial compound in the body that causes tissues to grow.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
But if it's constantly elevated, it could increase cancer risk. So you need to have peaks and valleys of mTOR. So if you're fasting, you have a valley. You can put butter in your coffee and your mTOR will stay perfectly low. So the number one benefit of fasting is mTOR stays low. Number two is insulin stays low. In an independent study of 300 different breakfast options,
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133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Coffee with butter and MCT had the lowest effect, zero, on insulin levels. So now I've turned off hunger using a small amount of fat. I've increased exclusions on water so my mitochondria work better. I've had the electrolytes in danger coffee and from the sodium in the water. So now I've got hydration. I've got exclusions on water. Yeah.
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133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And I just don't care about food because the small amount of fat affected leptin and ghrelin, which are things that cause hunger and cravings. And now I can go all day. I can go till two o'clock. I could eat or not eat. I'm not going to think about tacos. Right. So that creates peacefulness. No wasted thoughts about food. No sense. Oh, my gosh, I'm starving. I'm going to die if I don't eat.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
None of that nonsense. Yeah. And thinking about taking out that big F. Yeah. You know, night. Yeah. If you want peace, don't be hungry. Right. If you want peace, have so much energy that if someone comes in who would have triggered you, you're like, I have enough energy for my prefrontal cortex to stop me from cursing at them.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I used to have this huge muscle in my middle finger from driving, right? Yeah. Just because I have middle finger, middle finger, right? And I don't get triggered like that anymore. And some of that's because I've reprogrammed my threat networks with the stuff in heavily meditated. There's a way to go in to these altered states. You can use psychedelics. You can not use psychedelics.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
to edit the things that cause your biology to feel a fear without you thinking about it. And then I edited my hunger response. I edited my intimacy needs and abilities so that there's way more spiritual connection from lovemaking. And then I built a powerful community of millions of biohackers. I run the biohacking conference. It's in its, I think, 14th year now. Yeah.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And 4,000 people showing up. And during World Biohacking Day, there's something like 80 meetups around the world. And this is a community of people who care about being happy, about living a lot longer, and just having control of your biology. And the number one reason you want control is so you don't yell at your partner or your kids and you don't do things you're ashamed of.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I spent my life doing that. Right. Why was I so mean? It's because I didn't have enough energy in my prefrontal cortex so that I could intercept my urges and then choose to act like an adult.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
You can use MCTs. You can use ketone esters. But if you use – not esters. Ketone dial is better. You can use exogenous ketones, which give you more energy in the brain, but you don't get the exclusion water. So just – it can be a tiny drop. So blending the coffee with a little butter and MCT. Just a little bit. Or, funny enough, coffee oil.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Which is an massive anti-inflammatory agent in the brain. The reason espresso is different than coffee is espresso has exclusions on water because the coffee oils are mixed with the coffee. But brewed coffee doesn't do that. So you could drink espresso without blending butter. I'd brew espresso and then I'd put a little bit of fat in it and blend it for 20 seconds.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Now, there's... medicinal mushroom use, things like chaga, things like cordyceps, lion's mane. And these are separate from psychedelic mushrooms. And they also have different effects on your immunity, your inflammation, or your cognition. I was really excited by lion's mane when I first read the studies because the two pathways to cognitive enhancement
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And let's see, Headstrong is my big neuroscience book. And my little like tip of the hat to myself thing, it hit the New York Times monthly science bestseller list, which is very hard to do. And it was sandwiched between Homo Deus and sapiens. Wow. I'm like, whoa. Wow. That was one of those days. That's kind of cool.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
You don't forget when you see that and you're just like, wow, like just so much gratitude. Yeah. Yeah. In that book, the two things that matter are BDNF, which is brain-derived nootropic factor. This causes you to have a young person's neuroplasticity, the ability to learn and change and transform, and mitochondrial function.
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133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Upregulate mitochondria, upregulate BDNF, and then personal development is easy. And Lion's Mane has great studies behind it. So I tried Lion's Mane, and it didn't do anything. I actually know what it feels like to raise BDNF. And I was so disappointed. And years later, I found out why. For lion's mane to work, it needs to be dual extracted.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
That means you need to use alcohol and you need to use heat in order to drive out the active compounds. If you just eat lion's mane, which is delicious actually, I like to cook it, you don't get the benefits. So most of the things that you'll get are made from the wrong part of the mushroom, because they'll use basically not the fruiting bodies, or they're extracted only with heat.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So when you take a proper lion's mane tincture that has alcohol and heat extraction, if you take it before you go to bed, you'll have vivid dreams. That's BDNF. And if you take it in the morning, you just like, I'm more dialed in. I feel younger, more focused. So sadly, I haven't seen a lot of results.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Before I was 30, I had most of the diseases of aging, arthritis, high blood sugar, prediabetes, high risk of stroke and heart attack, in part because I was constantly inflamed because I was sleeping in a moldy bedroom. So I went on this path of saying, how do I get rid of this stuff? And it turns out that it's all mold poisoning mitochondria. So what do you do? What did you do?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Let's see, the Upgrade Cafe in Santa Monica that I opened, I think 2014, the first no-seed-oil, all-grass-fed restaurant in LA. We opened for eight years. In its first year, we put Chinese herbs and mushroom in coffee. I stopped doing that because they taste bad. Really? I don't want to ruin coffee with mushrooms. I'll just take a mushroom tincture or a mushroom capsule and enjoy the coffee.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Right. Right. And that said, if anyone's using any product that works for them, including the different brands of mushroom coffee, I fully support you doing that. Okay. Yeah. All that matters is, does it work for you? And are you telling yourself that it works or is it actually working? Right. Right. So, you know, go off of it for a week, go back on for a week and see what the difference is.
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133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
For me, avoiding toxins in coffee is the most important thing. Yeah. And there are so many toxins in coffee.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Okay. I'll explain kind of how the process for danger coffee works. And I quit coffee for five years before I went to Tibet because every time I would drink it, an hour or two later, I would feel this incredible tension and pressure in my chest. And I would want more sugar and I'd want more coffee and this icky feeling. And I thought I'm allergic to coffee. This sucks.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Coffee is my favorite thing on earth. And I came back from Tibet, had a cup of coffee, and it was like something turned the lights on. I'm like, oh, my God, I love coffee. I'm not allergic anymore.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And I, because it was a special thing, I bought really high-end single-estate coffee. Thank God. And then the next day I bought a different high-end coffee and I got the same symptoms. I couldn't go from being not allergic to allergic in one day. It's not me. It's the coffee. And I went deep in the literature. Here's what happens. Poorly treated soil. makes weak plants.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Weak plants attract insects. Insects carry toxic mold spores in on their feet. They infect the beans. They're sitting in the beans, but they're not growing yet. They bring the beans in the trucks where mold starts. And they put them either in big piles on a tarp, which makes more mold, or they put them in dirty river water for two days, which also makes mold.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And then they dry them out in the sun, then they roast them. The primary mold toxin in coffee is called OTA or ocrotoxin A. And it's such a problem that the government of China, Japan, most of South America and all of Europe have legal standards in place at 10 parts per million or less in coffee. It's that toxic. Parts per million. You will not taste it. You're not going to see the mold.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
It's invisible, but it's linked to direct mitochondrial dysfunction in studies. I published 36 studies on DaveAsprey.com that show that this is a heat-stable toxin that survives roasting. It survives brewing. Wow. It survives roasting. Survives roasting, survives brewing, and it's in the coffee when you drink it.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Because the US has no legal standards for mold in coffee, when it's illegal to sell coffee in Japan or China or Europe, they send it to the US and we drink it. And then an hour later, we want to punch people and we get jittery and we want sugar. And I'm not making this up. All those governments around the world did this for a very specific reason. And I would support the U.S.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
having the same standards as Europe for coffee. Since they don't, danger coffee, it says on the label,
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
mold free if you look at some of the other brands i've been associated with in the past it no longer says mold free on it just clean yeah and here's what people can do if you want to know if the coffee you're drinking today and it varies by batch and all that is mold free or not there's a very simple test you drink your coffee and then you're gonna have to pee
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
If you have to pee and your bladder is full, your coffee was clean. But most people, they drink coffee and go, I really have to pee, and you pee and you pee a half a cup. Why did your body tell you you had to pee if your bladder wasn't full? Because OTA is a toxin that targets your bladder and your kidneys, and the body actually got a stress response
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
which you may blame on your spouse, by the way. It's a fear thing, but it's a justified fear. And so your body now says, I'm going to pull water out of blood plasma. Now you get some dehydration. I'm going to use it to dilute the toxin, and I'm going to give you a signal that you have to pee. So if you have to pee and your bladder is not full, look at what was in your coffee.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
That's why danger coffee is such a big deal.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
You have to go back to which coffee are you using?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
even who picked the coffee because these large coffee conglomerate they just hire migrant workers who aren't trained the coffee that we use for danger coffee is picked by trained coffee pickers and they don't pick the beans with defects they don't pick the unripe beans so it's better tasting coffee wow and then the process we're using is carefully controlled and then we lab test using
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Very specific tests.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Something else is happening in there. It wasn't just that she had purpose. I started the first all grass fed, no bad seed oil restaurant in LA. Ran it for eight years. And you can put love in food. This is why the Dalai Lama limits the number of people who touch his food before he eats it, because he doesn't want it to pick those vibes up.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
The one thing that will bind to OTA is something called humic and fulvic acid. Guess what? Minerals are in danger coffee. Yeah. I know there's no mold and there are toxin binding minerals. I'm a huge fan of both. Well, when you drink your danger coffee, you get your daily dose of humic and fulvic in the coffee itself. Wow. So I created this because you drink it.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Your body's like, yes, this coffee is so good. And the reason is that the body is really telling you the minerals are so good and the coffee tastes great, but like the minerals add this thing. That's not a flavor. It's like a desire.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And then the effect of the coffee is different because, as you know, if there's electrolytes in water, it absorbs differently.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So that's the whole story. Do you want a discount code for listeners for Danger Coffee?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Gary? Yeah. So go to DangerCoffee.com, use code Gary, and we'll give you a discount and we'll figure out what it is. It'll be meaningful, guys. Okay.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Okay. I'll talk about the journey real quick so people know the symptoms that would drive them to get a test and then what to do. Okay. Okay. I grew up living in a basement. That's a red flag if you live in a basement. Almost all of them are molded to some extent.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And this is in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which has a huge amount of toxic mold. If you live in a desert environment, mold is much more aggressive in the desert because it has to grow quickly since it's dry most of the time. So it turns out places like Phoenix, Albuquerque, San Diego have really bad toxic mold. But... I would have nosebleeds 10 times a day. It was just common.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I always carried like a thing of Afrin and Kleenex and it's not great in high school to do that. I had arthritis when I was 14 in part because I was constantly inflamed because I was sleeping in a moldy bedroom. I had asthma. I had all these weird rashes, all these weird food allergies. And I'm a bad methylator because I have MTHFR and COMT. and chronic strep throat.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
If you or your kid gets strep throat over and over, you have toxic mold. Wow. The reason for this is that bacteria and mold are ancient enemies. And when the strep bacteria that naturally lives in your sinuses and in the back of your throat, when it senses mold, and mold makes antibiotics, right? It becomes stressed. Remember the F words, fear? Okay, I'm going to fight. It makes a biofilm.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And chronic strep throat is the number one sign that you have toxic mold in your home.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
My youngest daughter has chronic strep throats. We've got to get you a dust test, and it's either at our school or it's at your home. It's probably at your school because you take care of your home. Yeah. And the problem with strep is that if you have chronic strep, your immune system can make something called PANDAS, which I had.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So not only was she getting value for her longevity, she was putting love in the food that makes the food do something different in ourselves. Wow. Wow.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And PANDAS is when your immune system starts reacting to a specific protein on strep, and it causes things I used to have, OCD and ODD and ADHD. Mm-hmm. And I even used to have a stutter and like I would do the facial twitch thing and I couldn't serve the volleyball unless I bounced it three times and I would constantly have to stim all the time.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And I had full on Asperger's syndrome as a kid and you can reverse autism. It's just a huge amount of work. Right. And I know mold is a part of it. I know MTHFR is a part of it. Yes. So these are some things. The other things that. I want people to know about. If you have really vivid dreams that are disturbing, that's also a sign of mold. And having bruises for no reason is a sign of mold.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
If you frequently bruise, you have nosebleeds, you have chronic strep throat and things like that, you have weird dreams, you have digestive disturbances that don't make any sense, you might wanna look at the mold environment. And there's two ways to test for mold in your environment. And one of them is called the Dust Test. You can go to, I think it's called thedusttest.com.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And you'll find that the mold toxins are present in dust. Depending on which of the mold toxins you have, they can absorb through your skin or by breathing or by eating. And in my case, I figured out I had mold because I went to a doctor. who was a very, very knowledgeable guy, the first guy to have liposomal glutathione on the market in Los Altos, California. His name was Tim Guilford. And
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
He said, Dave, my patients get better. You're not getting better. I want to give you an HIV test. I don't think you have it, but why is your immune system not functioning? Right. So I didn't have HIV, but he did give me a mold allergy test because we didn't have mycotoxin tests back then. And I was allergic to eight of the 10 most toxic molds. showing I'd been exposed.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And I'm like, oh, this makes so much sense. I grew up in a moldy basement. And then my first condo in the Bay Area had water leaked from the neighbors. You weren't allergic to them. You had them. I had mold toxins and I had an allergic response to them, which told me I had them. You had the antibodies. Yeah, I had the antibodies. So we couldn't test for the toxins.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
We could only test for antibodies then. And so I had been exposed to Saccharobotrys and Aspergillus. And Okay. I know that when I moved into this condo that was moldy that I bought, didn't know it was moldy, that suddenly I gained 30 pounds. I'd lost 50 of my 100 pounds. I was starting fat again. And my partner at the time, she also got fat and had emotional reactions that just made no sense.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
She also got fat. nightmares and things like that. This was toxic mold. And then move out of that place, move into a hundred year old house, which has water sitting under it when it rains. Mold, symptoms through the roof, physical anxiety, emotional issues, digestive issues, strep, it all comes back. And I'm like, okay, I think I've got the message here.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So I went on this path of saying, how do I get rid of this stuff? And it turns out that replacing methyl donors is really important so your body can do it. Binding the toxins is really important. So what I recommend people do now is get a dust test, and you can go to thedusttest.com and do an air test. You can go to gotmold.com.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And I don't have any relationship with the dust test other than I interviewed the guy. And 10 years ago, I invested in Got Mold, a small amount of money, so I have a whatever... It won't change my life if you don't get it, but just for full disclosure, right? Yeah. And these are going to tell you the environment you're in.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
However, if you've been exposed at work, at school, in schools, especially colleges, they're just full of mold because no one pays for building maintenance. Right. And all it takes is one water leak to get mold in a building.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So... You might have it in your body, but not in your home. You just have to get it out of your home for sure. And then if it's in your body, you can get a mycotoxin test. Is that something that you guys offer? We do. Okay. Is it something everyone can get everywhere? I don't know if they can get it. Tell them where to get it. So my favorite one is called mymycolab.com.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I'm actually going to write that down.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Because my Mycolab. Yep. And the guy who runs that, Andrew... Oh, geez. Andrew Campbell, if I'm remembering right. He's been practicing for 40 years treating mold. And it's the only test that will tell you, do you have the mold toxins and do you have an immune response to the mold toxins themselves? So he's a toxicologist.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
You can have the toxin, which is a direct toxic effect, but not have... And it's the immune response that's really nasty. It can be both because the toxins suppress mitochondrial function, which are going to cause stress and all kinds of problems. But an immune response on top of that is worse.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And once you know what toxins are present in your body at what levels, then you choose binding agents to remove them. The most common one is... activated charcoal, which I brought into the biohacking world. It was one of the first products I ever made. What about like zeolite or silica clay? These are all things that help. So there's zeolite and bentonite are the two types.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Zeolite oftentimes causes a lot of GI distress. The trick with zeolite is to take a higher dose, so you get first and second pass. Glutathione is terribly important, say, for OTA, which is in coffee. But if you have other toxins, it won't touch them at all. And the most horrible of the mold toxins I was exposed to is something called xeralinone.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And xeralinone is a synthetic estrogen made by mold, 10,000 times stronger than human estrogen. It'll absorb through the skin. I had man boobs. I had lower testosterone than my mom. And I had obesity in my teens and early 20s.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Not just water. Massive. Straight up fat because estrogen makes you fat, right? This is why women are squishier. Right. Fortunately, in women, they have EPA and DHA in their fat, which they're going to give to babies if they have babies. So Mother Nature wants that thing.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
That's why women with curves are considered more attractive because they're storing fat where it should be, which estrogen helps to do. So- Xeralinol is so bad. This is going to shock you, Gary. The pharmaceutical industry will concentrate Xeralinol into a drug called Xeronol for cattle. And it's just a waxy pellet. And it's so effective.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
They put the pellet in the cow's ear and the body heat melts the wax and it enters the bloodstream just through the ear canal. Cows on Xeralinol get fat on 30% less calories than Really?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Now. So this is a mold toxin. It's a mold toxin. That they purposely put into their ear. Uh-huh. Are you kidding me? It's tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue for poisoning cows. But the big thing here is if you live with zirelinone, it doesn't matter if you cut calories. You cannot lose weight. And this is why every young influencer who's never been fat, never dealt with obesity is
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
sitting there saying, I'm canceling out my candy bar with my Diet Coke. It's all about calories in, calories out. It is nonsense. I just proved that there's tens of millions of dollars being spent on a compound that makes you fat on less calories. If the compound can exist, calories in, calories out is nonsense. And it's mold. Isn't that crazy?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
They literally just blew my mind. Oh, there's more.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
This is my favorite topic. It really affected my life.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And this is why danger coffee is mold-free, because it matters. It really matters. Yeah. Now... If you go back in time a couple billion years ago, there's kind of two branches of life. There's bacteria and there's fungus. They have been fighting for dominance for two billion years. This is why antibiotics are so powerful.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
We take a bunch of penicillium mold and we extract a tiny amount of penicillin and that little pill changes all the bacteria in your body. Mm-hmm. Mitochondria are ancient bacteria. They are terrified of mold. They are part of this ancient battle. They're part of this ancient battle. So is it any wonder that when your body, which is studded with way more mitochondria than you have...
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
cells in your body, even more than you have bacteria in your gut, that your body freaks out when there's mold toxins? Of course it does. That's what causes the strep.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I went through a lot of health stuff. Before I was 30, I had most of the diseases of aging, arthritis, high blood sugar, prediabetes, high risk of stroke and heart attack. I'd been on antibiotics for 15 years for chronic strep and sinus issues, wrecked gut, massive brain fog. I mean, it was pretty bad. And my career was taking off. And I said, okay, I must have Lyme disease.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
It causes strep to proliferate and it directly, and there are dozens of studies on this, almost all of the mold toxins directly inhibit mitochondrial function. Your body makes less electricity, less heat, less willpower, less testosterone, less glutathione, less of everything you need. And our mutual friend, Frank Schallenberger, I quoted him a lot in my longevity book,
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
He says 48% of people under age 40 have early onset mitochondrial dysfunction. And everyone over age 40 has it. It's called aging, unless you do something about it. In my 20s, I had probably 20% of my available mitochondrial function. Chronic fatigue syndrome. Just so exhausted. Wow.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Well, is it any wonder that taking or just being exposed to a mold toxin in my coffee, in my bedroom, in my school is going to even further inhibit that? And I'm just going to feel like garbage and be unable to recover and unable to sleep and unable to do the things that you're supposed to do to recover, to repair injuries, to have joints that heal and all the things. So what do you do?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
What did you do? What are the... People watching. Here's what you do. If you get it from my michaelab.com. Number one, go to moldymovie.com. This is absolutely free. It's a gift. I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars making this documentary. Moldy movie. Moldy movie. It's one hour of your time. And there's a dozen top experts in the world.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And a dozen people like you and me who've been affected by mold. No one will tell you you're crazy who sees that movie. Your doctor, if they see this movie, will stop gaslighting you. Wow. And one of the most powerful stories in the movie is a couple. They're both doctors and they're married. And they move into a moldy home. And she gets massive disabling symptoms. And he has no symptoms at all.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Because... She's a doctor. She knows if you have more than five symptoms, you're a hypochondriac. This is standard medical school training. So she thinks she's a hypochondriac, except her body temperature's elevated. So she knows it's real. She biopsies every organ in her body. How painful is that, right? Probably not her brain. And she can't find it. And finally they realize it's mold.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And they're sitting there next to each other on camera. This is in the final cut for the documentary. And he says, I never felt anything, but I believe her and it's real. And she says, I didn't believe myself until I got the data. And the reality is the set of symptoms that come from mitochondrial dysfunction are so broad. Yes. That is the hub of the wheel.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I talk about the hub and the spokes all the time. You nailed it. So one person has massive anxiety and weird dreams. Another person has frequent infections. The other one just gained 40 pounds for no reason. And they think it's different. And it's all mold poisoning mitochondria. So you do the MyMycoLab test or maybe a similar test. Find out what toxins you have.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Different toxins get bound by different compounds. And the most broad spectrum compound is activated charcoal. You take it a half hour before you eat. And it's worse because people who have MTHFR are also more likely to have a genetic discrepancy in something called HLA-DR4.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Okay. I was guessing you'd be super familiar with that. Yeah, I am. So people with HLA-DR mutations... We were designed to survive in a world where you're going to invade another village or country. You're going to get shot by an arrow. You're going to clot very quickly so you don't bleed to death.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And your immune system is aggressive so that you don't get sick when you eat all the food and get exposed to these new people. And then you're going to go home and then go do it again next week. Right. So quick clotting, aggressive immune response.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
put those people in mold the quick clotting causes all kinds of problems and the aggressive immune response causes all kinds of problems so our ancestors were marauders the vikings yeah right and i have those genes so that's why my blood would clot within 10 seconds of taking out when i was in my late 20s i was at high risk of stroke and heart attack because of that
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And it's why I had an aggressive immune response. And it's also tied to that MTHFR thing where I couldn't detox because methylation is one of the detox pathways. The other one is – the primary one is via glutathione. So intravenous glutathione, oral glutathione really changes things for most mold people unless they can't handle glutathione because they have a COMT problem with sulfur. And then –
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
One of the doctors thought that. To be really clear. Sounds like it, by the way. 90% of people with Lyme actually have toxic mold, which is why they have Lyme. Lyme is a symptom of toxic mold. And I say that based on genetic studies out of UCLA. So in other words, not a tick bite.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
The other one that's less known but is critically important, and I wrote about this in my most recent book, Before Heavily Meditated, is glucuronation.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So calcium deglucurate is a relatively affordable supplement, and glucurate is the second way the liver detoxes after glutathione.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Deglucurate. Deglucurate. And it's available from a variety of brands. It's not expensive. And calcium deglucarate is so important because some mold toxins only get detoxed by glucarate and others only get detoxed by glutathione.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So if you were to say, I don't really know what I have, I'm saving my money here, you would take some activated charcoal, possibly zeolite if it doesn't mess up your gut, a half hour before you eat. Every meal? It could be every meal, yeah. If you get constipated, back off. That's the risk from it.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And don't take those compounds near prescription drugs or expensive supplements because they'll bind to those as well. And they have an electrical charge that makes them specifically attract toxins. So you do that, and the reason it's a half hour before is that it'll be right where the bile is secreted into your gut, and mold toxins are fat-soluble. They act like cholesterol.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
They're almost identical chemically. So those of us who are wired for famine and for invasion— We save our bile, we recycle it, which means toxins get recycled over and over. But if you take this a half hour before a meal, you won't recycle your bile. You'll make more bile. It'll bind it. Yep.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And if you have some coffee, I mean, I suggest danger coffee, it increases bile flow, which is something you want to do anyway. You could also take some bitters. So you start doing this and you're saying, oh, I feel better because I'm binding the toxins. The other thing that I recommend, and this is, I don't know why it's controversial, just people have this anti-drug thing.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Well, they might have got a tick bite, but they would have recovered if they didn't have something suppressing their immune system, which is mold. Clear the mold and the Lyme magically gets better. So I didn't know this at the time. And so I bought a Rife machine in about 1997. This was a little... Was it an old school one you held with the aluminum... Yes, with the charged gas tube. Okay.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I have no bias for or against any compound on the planet. Show me risks, show me benefits, and I'll decide. Taking an antifungal medication for sometimes a month, sometimes six months, especially for people who've been in mold for years. It changes their entire life. I'm kind of antifungal. It's Sporinox. Sporinox. Itraconazole is the other name for it.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So fluconazole is for yeast and itraconazole is for mold. There is a great chance that you have mold growing in your sinuses or elsewhere in your body if you've been exposed to mold for a long period of time. So if binding the toxins doesn't solve the problem, then do this. And here's the thing. Having had chronic fatigue, which is oftentimes caused by toxic mold, I... I've suffered a lot.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I've been so tired, so much brain fog. There is no reason to suffer when you're detoxing. It means you don't know about ozone.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Ozone will stimulate your mitochondria. It also means you haven't given yourself permission to do what it takes to feel good while you recover. And the number one thing you can do is you can have some coffee in the morning, one or two cups, not 10 cups. And you do it in the morning specifically to raise cortisol when it needs to go up.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And because coffee, especially with some MCT and butter, it turns your brain back on. There's no reason you can't use modafinil. which is a high-performance drug. I popularized this one on Nightline about 14 years ago. It's much safer than Adderall. It's not a stimulant. And for most people with chronic fatigue, this prescription drug gives you your life back while you're recovering.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I've been on modafinil most days for 20 years. I wouldn't have learned how to meditate the way I know how to do. There would have been no biohacking had I not used a cognitive enhancing drug, especially when I had crippling brain fog and chronic fatigue syndrome. So it's okay to use any means necessary to feel good. Right. I also...
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
learned how to do ozone therapy from an 88-year-old dentist who's since passed, who was treating people with brain cancer successfully with ozone, just putting it in their ears. So he took me into his clinic in Sunnyvale, California, and said, hey, Dave, I'm going to teach you how to do this. Showed me which machines to buy. And this was a long time ago, before ozone was as popular as it is now.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And I put ozone in my butt. That's how you do it. Insufflation is the technical term. Mm-hmm. And I remember for one minute, I had mental clarity. And I thought, oh my God, I remember what this is like. And then the next day I did it, I got two minutes. And I did it every night for a year. And it turned my mitochondrial networks back on and it changed my life.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So EBU, transdermal, 10-pass, whatever you can do. All of them work. And the cheapest thing is just rectal because you can do it at home. And I've done lots of intravenous as well. And years later, our mutual friend, Mark Hyman, reached out and he's been public. We've talked about this on his show, so I can share it. His home in New Hampshire had hurricane damage. And I was scared for his health.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So this is the kind that radiates through gas. The machines where you hold the handles are called Rife bar machines, B-A-R-R-E. So... My partner at the time was also living in a moldy house like I was, and she had developed herpes lesions in her sinuses. Terribly painful. Sitting reading something in the living room, and I thought, I'm just going to type in the frequency for herpes.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
He was really sick. And I said, Mark, you have all the signs of mold toxicity. Like you gotta get some ozone, right? You gotta start finding these. And he tested, it was mold causing it. And so he had his house cleaned up. He's added ozone to his clinic as a result of this. And it brought him back online, same way it did for me. So if you have mold, you got to bind the toxins.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
You got to get rid of the mold growing in your body and you should do some ozone therapy and you should take the supplements that allow you to methylate, that allow you to use glutathione to get rid of it and allow you to use glucarination to get rid of it. If you do those things, you're probably going to get better.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
You might also, for a while, if your adrenals are blown out, this is also controversial and it shouldn't be. You might take five milligrams of bioidentical cortisol in the morning and at lunch and maybe even at dinnertime because your body may not be making enough cortisol for you to heal. That was a problem I had as well. For you to heal, I see. Yeah. It also depends on your genetics.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Ozone is just so good at restoring mitochondrial function. It's a beneficial oxidant that causes your mitochondria to wake up and turn on their ability to make glutathione. And actually, technically, they don't make glutathione. They make more energy, which they then shuttle over to the glutathione manufacturing parts of the cells that then give it back. But the...
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
That was the one I wanted to get out. So my girlfriend saw me doing ozone and she's like, I want to try it. Okay. So it's a tiny little hose and you put it, you know, in your butt and you put some ozone in and you get a wave of just powerful energy from it. So it's maybe a half a liter small amount that goes in. We turn off the ozone machine.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
You feel the pressure. It feels like you have to fart. But does it dissipate? It'll dissipate. I mean, you might fart, you might not, but it'll actually absorb in. They call it the third lung because anesthesiologists will put oxygen in your butt if you're unconscious so that you can absorb it into your tissues if you're not breathing.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So you can absorb the ozone, and usually it just kind of goes away. But if you put too much in, some might leak out. It'll sound like you're farting. So we put it in and she's like, oh my gosh, I feel like I just had Adderall or something. I'm like, this is so good. And then she looks at me and she's like, I feel like I have to poop. And because I have a sense of humor, I was seventh grader.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And I didn't tell her what I was doing. She had no idea. And I hit start. Within five seconds, she screams, drops her book, grabs her nose, and goes, turn it off, turn it off, turn it off. There couldn't have been placebo there. She didn't even know she was part of the experiment. Wow. That is how powerful a rifle machine could be if you have the right frequency.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I looked at her, I said, you can't, you could get a blood clot. And she goes, what do I do? And I said, well, try getting on the trampoline. No.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I am. Oh, wow. Yeah, we laughed about it later. She's jumping on the trampoline, which of course makes it worse. I'm like, don't laugh, don't laugh, don't laugh. And finally she goes, you're lying to me, aren't you? I go, yeah. She got even later, don't worry.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
There's one other connection that is biohacking and mold related. It's circadian disruption. So when you have mold, your stress hormones get all screwed up and your ability to regulate your mitochondria with circadian rhythm breaks. Like I said, I grew up in a basement toxic mold. It affects sleep. I would stay up until 2 a.m. starting at 10 years old and I would read books.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I read a lot, but I was chronically sleep deprived. As an adult, it would be really helpful for me to have been able to go to sleep at 10 or 11 And then wake up like a normal human. But I would go to sleep at 2 and not want to start work until 10. My career took off, but I was always tired. And I just couldn't do it.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And this caused me to, in the mid-2000s, to go really deep on circadian biology and understand the connection between mitochondria and light. And what a lot of people miss is that mitochondria evolved in the ocean. And so these are dumb little bacteria. They have limited sensing of the environment. They are quantum sensing, though. They can pick up each other and things.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
But they have light receptors called, I want to call it chromophores. I was going to call them photophores. Chromophores, yeah. Chromophores, thank you. And so they need a clock to know how they should be behaving. So the clock starts in the morning, red light, sunrise. Mm-hmm. And this is why red light is so important in the morning and at night.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
If you have mold, you got to bind the toxins. You got to get rid of the mold growing in your body. And you should do some ozone therapy. And you should take the supplements that allow you to methylate. If you do those things, you're probably going to get better. What are the people watching this do?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And then as the sun moves overhead, now we have overhead bright light with lots of blue spectrum, lots of infrared, and it's warmer. And there's the most food between noon and 2 p.m. because they're eating algae that's benefiting from sunlight. And then the sun gets also red again as sunset happens and temperature starts to drop.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And then they go into their hibernation phase where they would drop down in the water, sit there at night, and then in the morning it gets warmer. They come back up to the surface. This is the cycle of life since before we had multicellular organisms. We're still yoked to that. And inside your eyes, there are about 5% of the light receptors do not receive radiation.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
light that your brain ever sees. So light comes into your eye. 95% of it goes into your visual processing system. The other 5% is received and routed around it directly into the SCN, which is the central clock in your brain that tells all the systems in the body what time it is.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And for me to change my circadian rhythm so that I could go to sleep like a normal, healthy person, I learned that light is more important than food or temperature or anything else. And this led me.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
For circadian rhythm. And circadian rhythm controls whether your mitochondria work or not.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And so a lot of people, especially you go back 20 years, would say that's not possible, therefore it isn't. And it's this anti-science view that's holding back longevity, holding back functional medicine. Because... people have these stories that I have to know why it works or it doesn't work. That's not real.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
If you have bright light at night, you become insulin resistant. How do you control this in your heart? Well, you want to have dimmer switches and red nightlights. It's dim like candlelight dim in my house after the sun goes down. When I'm in hotels, there's a couple of things that I do. You and I are both wearing true dark glasses. These are not blue blocking glasses.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Blocking blue light will make you sick because you need blue light to wake up during the day. The mitochondria are looking for it all day long to know that they should be regulating your insulin. They should be making power that you're awake. So these glasses are for indoor use only, and they block half of blue light, the toxic half under 490 nanometers.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So these are a very specific filter for light. For like the man-made light. For the man-made light. So you notice how your brain is more relaxed in the studio underneath these LEDs?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And that's because the TrueDark glasses are not blocking blue. They're blocking toxic blue and allowing beneficial blue in. But then at night... I switched to these and these took a lot of time to develop.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
You're not alone. My company, True Dark, this is the first modern circadian glasses company. We developed these, even filed a patent on them. And there's four colors of light that you have to block. It's not just blue light at night. It's amber, it's green, it's blue, and it's violet. And you have to block the brightness and the angle of the light is a really important variable.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So they're darker at the top than at the bottom. And there's no other glasses like TrueDark's on the planet. And it's hard to make these. But we're also the only... I'm going to take them off too. Yeah. We're also... It's like taking a sleeping pill. It really is like taking a sleeping pill. We published a study in a medical journal. And we're the only company to do that.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And we use EEG measurements from 40 years of Zen. And we show that 15 minutes of wearing the true dark glasses puts your brain in the same state as meditation. Your stressful brainwaves, beta drops and alpha goes up. So you can put these on and you chill out. And if you're starting to get a migraine or something, like, oh, let's have noise counseling headphones for my eyes.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And that's what true dark glasses are. And I'm going to fly to Dubai tomorrow. I will have zero jet lag. Because when I wear these on the airplane with a baseball hat, my body thinks it's dark, even though I can see. And that means I can reset my circadian rhythm and I will get seven hours of sleep with 90 minutes of deep and 90 minutes of REM.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
When I land, I get jet lag nowhere on the planet because of true dark. So when you land, you'll put them on? I actually put them on on the airplane. If it's dark where I'm landing, I wear the glasses. So before I take off, I say, what time zone when I land is it going to be? And I'm going to put these on when it's dark at my destination.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So it might be light where I am now, but I know if it's midnight in Dubai, I'm going to put the glasses on even if it's bright where I am. So I usually take the 1225 a.m. flight.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So my favorite answer for people, when I say, well, it looks like in a study, there's results from this thing. And they say, well, without a mechanism of action, I can't accept it. I go, no problem. The mechanism is leprechauns. I get really mad. I'm like, well, okay, every mechanism of action we've ever figured out, they're all stories to explain reality that our bodies do not know how to sense.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
What you would do then, when you take off, it's actually daytime in Dubai. Right. So you tell your eyes and your digestive system that it's daytime. So what you would do then is you say, oh, is it noon in Dubai? No glasses. Have the light on on the airplane and eat something. Maybe even have some coffee. The idea is get all the signals. And the signals are in order.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
It's light, then food, then temperature, and then socialization or exercise. So what you want to do on the airplane is like, okay, everyone else around me is sleeping because they don't understand how to not get jet lag. So you have the light on. You can even get weird glasses that shine lights in your eyes if you want to look like a total freak on the airplane. I don't think I need them.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
I don't feel like that. And then when it starts to get about 6 p.m. in Dubai, you put on the true dark sleep glasses. And now your body's going, oh, wait, he stopped eating. And now I'm getting a signal of darkness, let me reset my clock. And you keep those glasses on religiously when you're checking into your hotel and everything else.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
It helps to have a baseball hat to keep light from coming in from above you. And then you'll be tired because you're wearing those when you get there. And you think, wow, I know it's noon back where I was, but my body now, because of light and food timing, has no jet lag at all. And it has been life changing. Wow.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Well, let's do this too. TrueDark.com, use code Gary, and I'll give you guys a discount as well. And this is- By the way, I didn't start this to be like- No, no.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Yeah, they're organic. And this is not my largest company by a long shot. We use these glasses at 40 Years of Zen to keep people in these advanced meditation states when they come out of the pods. People are using ketamine as an optional thing at 40 Years of Zen. We use TrueDarks every single time because you can stay in an alpha state for longer.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So for me, they're necessary, and it's one of my smallest companies. I'm not trying to sell these. They just changed my life, and I couldn't buy them, so I made them. That's what this is about. Amazing.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And we know beyond a doubt that time and space are both illusions created by the way we see the world through our brains. Mm-hmm. And however, if you were to try and live as if those aren't real, you're not gonna like what happens, right? So this is just how we see the quantum reality that we all live in.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
it means that you're always in control of your state. In Buddhism, there's sort of three steps. And the first one is empathy. And this is the ability to feel other people's emotions. It's kind of a problem because a lot of people are tweaked. So empathy isn't that high of a state, but it's better than being apathetic, right? So after you tick off empathy, you evolve into compassion.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And compassion means instead of feeling other people's issues, you automatically wish them well, even in your mitochondria, like, ah, even if they're a jerk, whatever, I wish you well. And you do it before you judge them. And that's a hard thing to do. And that's a lot of the work at 40 Years In is developing compassion for those who you feel have harmed you. But the reason you do compassion...
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
is what the Buddhists would call equanimity. And in the West, we call it resilience. And that's the picture of a monk meditating in the middle of a storm because nothing can take you out of your chosen state. And to me, that's the ultimate. Wow, that's a great one. Well, I appreciate it, Dave.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
There's a view called biocentrism that really says all of reality comes about as a manifestation of consciousness. We also know that the human body is a quantum system. And there was a study I posted about it and it didn't like blow up the world the way I thought it would.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And for the first time ever, within the last five years, we figured out how to look at something called proton spin in living cells. And scientists found out that every time your heart beats, the proton spin of all of the molecules in the brain changes direction.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Instantly, with no lag time, which means there's a quantum coherence between your heart and your brain and between all the cells in your brain. This means that our brains are quantum. Our biology is quantum. The microtubules inside our mitochondria are quantum. So, of course, they're picking up quantum messages. Yeah, I would, of course, believe that. Right? Yeah.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And it doesn't mean that it's easy for us to sense that, but this is where intuition comes from. And people might be saying, well, Dave, you're a biohacker. I know you from ketosis and putting butter in coffee. I've also written a major New York Times bestselling longevity book and a neuroscience book.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And I've run a neuroscience clinic for now 12 years called 40 Years of Zen in Seattle, where the world's top performing executives and athletes and celebrities come and do decades of meditation in five days with computers attached to their heads. And I've studied intuition. And
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
What happens in reality is your body, your mitochondria, it's like a distributed network, a separate consciousness from your brain is constantly scanning reality. The mitochondria are the frontline sensors of reality and they sense reality a third of a second before your brain gets a signal. And you're saying a third of a second, really? Yeah, if I clap my hands,
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
you're a smart guy, you know it took the sound some amount of time to hit your ears and then you heard it, right? It's not real. What's not real? The third of a second lag time is invisible to you. So when the sound hit your body, your consciousness didn't get the first electrical signal of the sound until a third of a second went past. So there's a censorship window that all humans have.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Just like when they do live broadcasts, there's an eight-second window in case someone has a wardrobe malfunction, they can shut it off.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Drops the F-bomb. Right. Our body reserves a third of a second to decide whether it's going to let you hear that or see it or whether it was worth your attention or time. And it is the mitochondria that are the frontline sensors.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So they're not power plants. They're environmental sensors. And then they're computers that run a simple program. They are dumb little bacteria. And then after that happens, the program decides, will I make stress molecules, inflammation molecules? Will I make electricity? Will I make heat? Or will I make some proteins, the mitochondrial proteins?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
So there's a decision that's made long before your brain is even involved. And it's entirely invisible to us. And I believe after a lot of research that mitochondria are the source of our intuitive sense of the world. Wow.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
They're like a firewall for reality. And imagine what would happen if you and I picked up everything happening right now. Our little brains that are actually really intelligent but very slow, they'd be overwhelmed. It'd be like you were on a high dose of LSD all the time. There's so much going on. What do I pay attention to? So mitochondria, they have to have...
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
a decision-making hierarchy and I figured out what it is because I'm a computer hacker and I created distributed systems and I troubleshot them for a decade. So if you assume that there's billions of mitochondria all independently sensing reality, they vote with each other to decide what's real.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
It's called quorum sensing and they do this simultaneously with photons, with chemicals, with magnetism and with quantum coherence.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And they go, all right, what's going on? Well, what do mitochondria care about? They care about life. And they run the operating system of all life on the planet, even trees, slime molds, politicians, all of them.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Is that on purpose?
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
And humans, just to be clear.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
You got me with that one. So what do they do? Here's the operating system for life. Number one, run away from, kill, or hide from scary things. All life does this. Now, if you're a peanut, well, let's see, I can't run away. I have roots. So I'll put a shell on it and I'll fill myself with lectins and some other things that make it so it's less attractive to eat me. Yeah. Mycotoxins for sure.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Right. And if you're a skunk, you spray someone with something stinky. Right. And if you're a human, you either hide in a cave or get a spear. Right. Like all life will do this. Right. So that's fear. These are all F words. It makes it easy to remember. Fear comes first. This is also why we ruminate on things because our body says emphasis on fear, put more energy into fear.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Because if something eats you, it's game over. And these dumb little mitochondria that run your reality, they don't understand time. They just know they might be the last on earth and they better not get eaten. Right. And speaking of getting eaten, the second F word, fear. Sorry, second F word, food. Right. So eat everything.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Because famines have wiped out everything throughout the last four and a half billion years or so the earth has been here. So fear, food, third F word, all life has to do to stay around forever, Gary. Do you know what that one is? Function? No, like multi-generational stuff.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Fear, food, fertility. Ah, fertility. It could be the other F word. I was like wondering if I was going to get you with that. Yeah, well, I knew you were baiting me after you said slime mold. Right. So fear, food, fertility. In order. Okay. So before you get a chance to think as a human... Is it scary? Can I eat it and can I hump it? Okay. Now. Like most men. I feel like most men think about that.
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
133. Dave Asprey: “Father Of Biohacking” On The War Happening Inside your Cells
Well, I just excused everything you've ever done that you're ashamed of. It was your mitochondria, not you. They are a separate intelligence inside your brain. I can't wait to tell my wife. Exactly. It wasn't your fault. It was your mitochondria's fault. I can't wait to tell my wife. And it's funny because energy allocates in order and in amount.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
First off, for all of my entrepreneur friends listening, do not market laziness. I didn't sell as many of that book as I expected because I thought this was a really cool thing. And it's recognize your body is lazy by design. All of mother nature is lazy. And the flip side of laziness is efficiency. So we don't want to waste one electron. We don't want to waste effort.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And if you think about it, you want to sell 10,000, whatever you sell, do you want to sell them with the most work or the least work? You want to do it with the least work. So entrepreneurs are the laziest people on the planet, right? And you could be even pissed off that I said that, but think about it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
You only do what works and you know that if you can do it more effectively, more efficiently, you'll get better results. So what this means though, is we get a lot of guilt and shame because you wake up and you say, well, I should want to go to the gym because I know it's good for me. But your body is screaming at you. Don't you know that that takes energy? And wasting energy is a bad thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And look, there's a couch and there's a croissant. So doesn't that look more comfortable? And it does. And so you feel this emotional, this attraction to things that are bad for you because your body is trying to get more energy in and waste less energy.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So instead of saying, well, I'm a bad person because my body wants to do what two billion years of evolution taught it to do, there is a way to use basically what the marketing industry does to make yourself motivated. And this is the hack for entrepreneurs. Recognize that your body loves to save more than makes sense.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And you see this on every single website, including mine when I'm selling danger coffee or whatever. 10% discount. Why does saving two bucks on a bag of coffee feel like you're saving more than $2? It's because your emotions, before you can think, know that saving is really good.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So instead of motivating yourself, I'm gonna go to the gym, I'm gonna sweat, I'm gonna work hard, I know it's good for me, that's all logic and the body doesn't do logic. Instead, you wake up and you say, today, I am going to do biohacking instead of going to the gym, even if it involves going to a gym or to an Upgrade Labs or something.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And the motivation is instead of wasting a lot of time, I'm going to do a more effective workout. So you just tell yourself, I am going to save 45 minutes of suffering by going to the gym right now. That flips the switch on your emotional body. So now all of a sudden, oh, yeah, I'm going to save because saving feels bigger than doing work. You can do this in your entrepreneurial life as well.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I have this long hour meeting. This is going to suck. Well, what if you reposition that mentally and say, I'm going to save eight hours of work later. So in your mind, you're saying, wow, I'm saving seven hours of effort. And that meeting will not feel painful.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I have the average response time in my brain of an 18 year old.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Understand, savings motivates you because your biology is lazy, even though you have an immense drive and power, otherwise you wouldn't be an entrepreneur. So I don't want to waste my willpower. I can use my willpower to overcome my desire to not go to the gym, or I could change my desire so that I want to go to the gym so I can save my willpower for building my business.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I'm happy to be here.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
This is one of my favorite parts of biohacking. What really happens, and this is totally invisible, is that say I clap my hands. And you know that it took some time for the sound to get to your ears and then you heard it. But that's a total lie. Because if we glued electrodes on your head, like we do at my neuroscience company,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Well, your auditory cortex, the part of your brain that hears things, a third of a second after the sound got to your body, your body allowed your brain to hear it. And during that third of a second, the body decides what you're allowed to hear and what you're going to feel about it. And then you're going to make up a story that matches the feeling. This is how all of reality works.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
There's a one third of a second window where your body gets to betray you. And understanding that is pretty profound. Now you go, oh. My body's pre-processing reality for me. How is it doing that? What are the rules it's using? Well, it's using rules that it learned starting from the moment of conception to try and figure out how to survive in this world.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So your body's creating a user interface to help you survive. Unfortunately, it got programmed by that time someone almost dropped you when you were one year old, by that coach who was mean to you, by the bullies, by parenting, even the best parents make mistakes. So all of us, especially when we're younger, we have triggers. There's things that just piss you off. They get under your skin.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
That is ancient survival systems that are making you feel a certain way to try and keep you alive. And understanding that's not you. It's not that you got anxious. It's that your body got anxious and then you chose how to react about it. But if you don't know that, you're going to feel that you're the same thing as your body. And then this is the worst for entrepreneurs.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Let's say you're cruising along, business is doing okay, and then something happens. Potential lawsuit from some douchebag employee who's making up a story because you fired him because they stole money. I've had that happen, by the way. So stuff like that. Okay, now the lawsuit or the bad PR, whatever, it feels like a threat to your body. And now you're in a state of fight or flight.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Your decision-making goes down, your team leadership goes down, and you're dysregulated. It happens all the time. Understand this was your body's response. It was not you. And by creating that division, now you can say, all right, I can tell my body's freaking out. Let me do some deep breaths. Let me do a cold plunge. Let me do whatever the biohack is to turn off the bodily response.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
In the meantime, though, I am not going to be triggered. I am not going to be reactive. And if you can stop being reactive when there's a perceived threat to your company, you'll see that a perceived threat isn't even real. You want to hear a story about that?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Years ago, about 2015 or so, Bulletproof is taking off. And to be clear, guys, Danger Coffee is my new coffee company. I have nothing to do with Bulletproof anymore. But years ago, Bulletproof is taking off. And I get on this guy Joe Rogan's show. And I didn't even know who he was because I don't actually listen to podcasts. I have 500 million downloads of my own. I make them.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I don't listen to them. So I go on and I changed Joe Rogan's life. I helped him with ADHD. We talked about kale, all kinds of good stuff. And he is prolific in his praise, multiple, multiple offsets. But then he has ownership in a company that decides to copy Bulletproof. So overnight he sends 25,000 organized trolls to my website to just decimate it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And he starts basically saying all sorts of bad things about me online.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Oh, it was, it was super dirty. It was financially motivated. And he actually deleted the three episodes where I've been on when he went over to Spotify. But the point of all this is that that freaked me out. I was already doing very well, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, and he caused a bump in sales, but it wasn't like life-changing, but it was cool. So it just felt weird.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And then all of a sudden that did trigger me. Like, what is going on? So I, for about six months, I was really dysregulated. My social media, instead of people saying, Dave, I lost a bunch of weight. My brain works like, thank you. You saved my life. My family's different. All this amazing stuff. It was just, you know, you're a con artist and a snake oil salesman.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And it was all from one guy trying to ruin my reputation. Well, that did push my threat response buttons. And so I was reactive to it. When I sat down and I did the stuff that I write about now, it's called the reset mode. My next book is about that. And went in and dealt with the trigger itself. Here was the reality. It felt like I was being tortured or that I was going to die or whatever.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Like it felt really threatening to my work in the world. Every time Joe Rogan says Dave Asprey is a bad man, I sell more coffee. That's the reality, but I couldn't see it. My body wouldn't let me see it until I dealt with an old trauma that was part of it. Every entrepreneur in existence has old traumas that we're unaware of that flavor how we see reality.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And if you find yourself being reactive, that's powerful, but you're unlikely to know you're being reactive. And this is why you have a team who trusts you. They're gonna tell you when you're being reactive. In my case, my buddy, Zach, who was a convoy commander in Iraq, driving generals past explosive stuff, just called me on my bullshit.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And you need a team who can call you on your bullshit when you're being emotional, you're being reactive. And if it happens, it's either an old trauma Or maybe you drank too much last night and your biology is out. And this is another thing entrepreneurs just need to understand.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If you're feeling dysregulated, your brain is foggy, you're reactive, you're cranky, whatever it is, it's either your biology is stressed or you're emotionally stressed. It's one of the two. It's always one of those. Deal with the biology first because it's easy and then the emotions feel less strong and then deal with the emotions.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If you do that, you're captain of your own ship and it changes everything.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Well, stress is not good or bad. Stress is what causes you to become stronger. So if you're a typical entrepreneur like me, well, if stress is what makes you stronger, let me do even more stress. In fact, I'll lift weights twice a day. Well, lifting weights is stress, right? And you can build incredible resilience with biohacking. You also need to recover. So I don't recommend you avoid stress.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I recommend you avoid useless stress. Things that only take out of your energy bucket instead of putting things in. And recognize where are you on the scale from 1 to 10. If you just flew back from Dubai and maybe you drank too much, maybe you didn't sleep, is it time to go to the gym lift heavy? and go out partying again? It's not.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So recognizing 80% of the improvement that you get cognitively or physically comes from recovering after stress. It does not come from the stress. Entrepreneurs are wired to focus on stress and to go into stressful situations because we can handle it. We're not wired to recover. When entrepreneurs come in to upgrade labs, we're measuring all this stuff. And they're saying, I want to put on muscle.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I'm like, you're not ready. Your body is not recovered. So if you want to grow, you want to improve, you recover first, then you stimulate, then you recover. 80% of the improvement comes from recovering. So don't be afraid of stress. Choose useful stress. And stress is different than anxiety. Anxiety is this feeling of doom.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
You feel it across your chest, in your gut, in your heart, and something is causing that. And it's either repetitive thoughts in the head. And for that, I use neurofeedback at 40 Years of Zen, and I teach a lot of techniques in my books. Or most likely, something is wrong inside your body. It doesn't have a micronutrient. It doesn't have a mineral it needs.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And the biggest needle mover is the simplest. If you were to take Vitamin Dake, it's just vitamindake.com. These are fat-soluble vitamins. And you take those along with Minerals 101 broad-spectrum minerals. The fat soluble vitamins drive the minerals into your tissues in the right place.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So now, if you have stress in your business, stress in your personal life, or you just go to the gym and you're lifting, Now the body says, okay, there was stress. Now I want to recover. Do I have enough zinc? Oh, I do. Now I can make testosterone. Now I can make muscle. Oh, I don't have enough zinc. I'm going to feel anxiety.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So at least half your anxiety and sometimes 80, 90% of it, it's just biology. It's not the thoughts in your head. You just think it's the thoughts in your head.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
In fact, it's the number one contributor the way I used to. You can have emotional stress. You can have relationship problems. Those are very real. It's just, they're impacting you so much because your biology is wrecked, because it's tweaked, because you have all kinds of problems. What I see now in entrepreneurs, both men and women, is that your testosterone is too low.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I am sticking to at least 180. And it's funny, there are a group of people in the longevity field who are kind of afraid of death. And it's like, I'm never going to die. And look, the universe is going to end at some point. I'm willing to wait around until that. And I don't think 180 is an upper limit. I just think it's 50% better than our current best. And this week, I celebrated my 29% birthday.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
It's because we have estrogen everywhere. You're using air fresheners and perfume and scented products and there's plastic and everything. When testosterone is low, it doesn't matter if men or women, women have more testosterone than estrogen, believe it or not, naturally. And since everyone is low right now, testosterone controls dopamine.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that causes you to be motivated by pursuing a goal. So a low testosterone man or woman who's an entrepreneur is not going to pursue their goals as much as they could. How do you fix it? Eat less bad oils, less synthetic fragrances and things like that, less plastic clothing, less plastic bottles. And then you eat more saturated fats.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So you can actually make testosterone and get a lab test. If I'd have had access to lab tests during the first part of my career, when I was 26, I made $6 million at the first company that did data centers. When Google was two guys and two computers, we built the buildings that held their servers. My testosterone was lower than my mom's. And I found this out back then. It was very hard to do.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
90% of people listening to this episode are low in their sex hormones right now. So you might as well test it. And testing it, you go to the doctor and doctor says, you don't need it. You're too young. I'm like, I'm done with that. You can go to axo.health, A-X-O dot health. And someone will come to your house and draw blood and advanced longevity panels like 600 bucks.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And then you get a dashboard. Where are my sex hormones? And let's say maybe you're 26, 27, like I was at that time when I made all that money. You can say, I don't need to. If you're feeling great, know your numbers. Because when you are 47 instead of 27, you can keep your testosterone and estrogen and other hormones right where you feel best.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And if you're 300 pounds, like I was in my early 20s, you're already wrecked, but at least recognize what is wrong. And you don't have to go to a doctor to do this anymore. You have a right to your own data.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If you know your ROAS, if you know the amount of traffic going to your website, how many downloads for your podcast, how dare you not know your thyroid, which controls energy, your testosterone, which controls motivation, and your inflammation, which is a sign that your efforts, the electricity your body makes is not going into something useful, it's going into inflammation.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If you have those variables, you manage them the same way you manage anything else in your business. And it costs less than you're probably spending on AdWords every day.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I had the founders of Prenuvo, which is one of the whole body scans on my podcast about three, four years ago. And they reached out a couple months later and said, Dave, that podcast episode saved 25 lives.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
People after they got their whole body scan, perfectly healthy looking people. They called them, said straight to the hospital, you're about to blow an aneurysm. And another dozen people had life-threatening things that needed treatment, things like stage three cancer that you have no symptoms of, but they can see it. So you go and you spend an hour doing that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Given that cancer, it's incredibly increased, especially in young people, for some reason over the last five years. Who could ever talk about what that was? But it's actually a big problem in young people. I do a whole body scan every year and it runs about 2,500 bucks. And it'll tell you if anything's wrong.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And some critics will say, you might find something that's wrong that wasn't actually wrong. Well, that's why you do it every year. So you see what changes. I have two spots in my brain that are congenital. They don't cause any symptoms, but if they got bigger, I'd go work on it. It's like basic maintenance.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Most people listening, if you're an entrepreneur, you're doing ideally hundreds of thousands to maybe a hundred million plus in your business. You can afford a few grand to make sure that your biology is keeping track with your business. It's required. In fact, it's silly to run a business and not manage your biology. It's just not that hard anymore. It used to be really difficult.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
You can get the actual health test. You can order the supplements. It's just not much work. And you don't have to eat perfectly. You might find this food really affects your sleep if you have a ring that tracks your sleep or something. But it just isn't that hard.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So I just look at my birthdays now as a percentage of my minimum acceptable duty life. And I think that has an effect on the cells themselves. There are interesting studies where they'll take really old people and they'll make a special like a hotel with all the TV shows and all the furniture from when they were young. And then their biological markers of aging go down.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
The one thing that I wish someone had taught me when I was learning entrepreneurship in my 20s, your company is a direct reflection of your energy. So if you're feeling physical anxiety because your body is not getting the nutrients it needs or you're feeling emotional anxiety, your team will be dysregulated.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So if you're powerful and shiny and bright and dialed in and clean, your company will be the same thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
It's silly to run a business and not manage your biology. Your body is lazy by design, and the flip side of laziness is efficiency. You're just wasting time in the gym. Being fit is important, but it does not follow that spending more time in the gym makes you more fit. If you can learn to recover faster than mother nature intended, you can do way more in your life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Show me an entrepreneur without ADHD. It's exceptionally rare. Like we are attracted to entrepreneurship because we have ADHD. And certainly I meet those diagnostic criteria. At least I used to. I might not anymore.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Well, if you're a muggle, your boss can tell you to pay attention to something and you will just do it. And that seems horrible. Because the ability to control your attention, so you put all of your attention onto something you care about and you ignore things that don't matter. That's the kind of world I want to live in.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I don't want to be someone, oh, look, pay attention to this stupid thing that doesn't move the needle for the world forward. No, you cannot make me do that. So the superpower is that. But what it does mean is you need to put systems in place to help you manage that. Because there will be things, if you have ADHD, that just take a huge amount of energy for you to do it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And they're different for different people. So identify the top 10 things that suck your energy the most. It might be paying bills. It might be taking out the trash, whatever it is. And just make a sacred commitment to yourself that you are never going to do those again in your life because they're not worth it. And hire someone to do it. And I also have to tell you this.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If you do your own laundry and you're an entrepreneur, you're doing it wrong unless you have a laundry fetish. If you love your laundry, go for it. The rest of the time, that is the lowest value thing you could ever do with your time. So be absolutely savage about hiring people to do the stuff you hate. You do that first. So I need a head of marketing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
No, you need someone to wash your socks and do the other things that you hate because you will be so much more free that then you will hire the right person to be in charge of marketing. Right. So you got to get rid of that stuff, especially if you have ADHD. It's critically important for you to just get everything done you want to get done.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So I just keep reminding myself, like, I'm somewhere in my mid-30s or less, and that's how I see the world. And I was only kidding when I said you were ageist. But the idea here is there are people out there who have the attitude, they have the brains of being 32 years old, and they might be substantially older than that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And I learned most of biohacking from people in their 70s and 80s when I was 26 years old. So I want to find the people who have lots of calendar years who have young energy and like, what are you doing? Because that's where we learn.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
There is an incredibly elegant system in your body that gets all sorts of stuff done so you don't have to pay attention. If you had to think about each heartbeat, you had to think about each breath and squeeze all the little things that need squeezing and pumping, your brain would be overwhelmed. In fact, you would just die. So there's an operating system in there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And that operating system is what's taking care of business in that third of a second before your conscious brain sees or hears anything. And it's the thing that's responsible for rapid threat detection. It's not very smart, but it's very, very fast. And you've felt this. If you ever lean against a hot stove and then you go, oh, that's pretty hot. I guess I should move my hand away.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And that's not how it works. You pull your hand away before you get burned and say, good thing I was so fast I pulled my hand away. It wasn't you. It was your operating system. Another name for the operating system is your ego. It's all the stuff that happens before you can think. And we all learn, including me, to feel shame and guilt about this part of us because we think it's us.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
No, it's a very fast, very ancient part of your operating system that's reacting to potential threats because it doesn't understand a threat is not a tiger. That's all it's wired for is don't die right now.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So embracing this idea that you have an operating system, that it does things without your knowledge or permission, and that you can influence your operating system by reprogramming it with things like meditation or breath work or 40 years of Zen, my neuroscience program is my preferred way.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Or that you can influence the operating system by making it feel more nourished and more safe, by feeding yourself the right way, by having darkness at night and sunlight during the day, and just make the body feel like it has more capacity, and then you're harder to trigger, and then you stay more focused on whatever it is you care about.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
One of the things that entrepreneurs do is we have this belief. If something is good, more of it's better. And if something is bad, you shouldn't have any of it. A good example there would be cortisol. It's the death hormone. Low cortisol is four times more deadly than high cortisol. So there's a proper dose and proper timing for everything. And we do the same thing in the gym.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
When I was a 23-year-old, 300-pound guy, I went to the gym 90 minutes a day, six days a week without fail for 18 months. You'd think I would have been ripped. No, I still weighed 300 pounds and I had a 46 inch waist when I started and when I finished. And it really pissed me off. So what was the problem? Well, if exercise is better, more exercise must be better to get results.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And we oftentimes do this in our businesses too. If this thing works, I need to do more of it. But there's a right amount of ad spend because spending more when ROAS goes down is a bad idea. So... What you want to be able to do is just allocate your resources effectively to doing the right amount of stuff.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
The power of self-deception works on cells. We call it placebo, but it's totally real. In fact, a lot of pharmaceuticals get approved that are 10% better than just what your mind can do on its own. We've all read Think and Grow Rich. I read that when I was 16, and I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. And we know that having a positive mindset, visualization matters.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And what we've learned about biology and the principle of smarter, not harder, is that the body doesn't change based on the amount of work you do. It changes based on how quickly you do the work and how quickly you recover. And using this, if you come to Upgrade Labs, we have an AI bike. And you can do this for 15 minutes a week. So three, five minute sessions.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And during that time, you never sweat. It's barely hard. It is 94% more efficient than going to a spin class. So in 15 minutes, the amount of time you spend brushing your teeth, you can have the same cardiovascular benefits. Actually, it's not the same, I lied. You can have six times more cardiovascular benefits than you would get from doing an hour of spin class a day.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
The reason is wrap it on, wrap it off. So think about this. Recovery is what causes you to improve, not pushing harder. And I look at what I've done to my body, to my mind when I was younger, because I believe that pushing harder got results. No, it's pushing hard for a short period of time and then recovering.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
That causes positive change in your brain, in your muscles, all throughout your biology. And the liberating part of this, it takes way less time to do that. So now you have time for your relationships and your business instead of just giving everything and just pushing, pushing, pushing. It's spikes of pushing followed by recovery, spikes of pushing followed by recovery.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And it follows, if you can learn to recover faster than mother nature intended, you can do way more in your life. And that's what biohacking really is about.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
What you would do is you would lift heavy and you would exhaust the muscles as fast as you can. And you would keep your workout to 15 minutes. And depending on what your goals are, you're going to go for the largest muscles first. So you want quads, you want your butt, you want your chest, you want your back.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If you just did those and you did it in 15 minutes, as hard as you can, and afterwards you laid on your back and took some deep breaths. And you are done. Instead of going and doing a lot more machines or say, well, more is better. Let me get on the treadmill. It turns out you'll get much better results. And you can do things that stack the deck in your favor.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
You make sure you've got your vitamin D, kingdom minerals 101, so that you have the precursors, the building blocks. And then you make sure of animal protein right after you work out. So now the body says, oh, I'm nourished and I'm safe. You might even finish and do some breath work. Just bring your heart rate down. Relax.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And the body says, oh, there was a brief stressor, must have been a tiger, but now I'm nourished and I'm safe. And when the body has experienced stress and it is nourished and it is safe, it will change rapidly and dramatically. But what I used to do and what most people do is they go into the gym for 45 minutes and if they really overtrain and then, okay, I'm done, they go back to work.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
But it's the nutrient status and the heart rate that really change things. So it's relaxing after you exercise. This means you go to the gym, you lift heavy twice a week. And look, if you're a fitness competitor and you want to get the best tricep, you're going to work that thing out. But I'll tell you, my exercise regimen, 20 minutes a week at Upgrade Labs using AI-powered tech.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
My muscles are AI. My cardio is all AI. I'm 4.8% body fat. The calendar thinks I'm 52. My lab tests think I'm 35. And I'm reasonably ripped. That's caffeine, by the way. All right. So you can do the same thing. If you got back, say you go to the gym four to six hours a week, if you got that back and you were in better shape than with what you're doing now, what would you do with four to six hours?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So why would it only matter in your business? It doesn't even make sense.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Spend it with your girlfriend or your boyfriend. Spend it on a new project at work, spend it learning how to meditate or play pickleball, whatever. You're just wasting time in the gym. So being fit is important, but it does not follow that spending more time in the gym makes you more fit. That is a myth.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
It is learning how to stimulate and recover in the briefest period of time frees you so that you have the body and the mind you want and you can do stuff that matters.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Well, if going to the gym is something you really, really love, you can do it as long as you're not overtraining. I don't know very many people who exercise for an hour a day who are not overtrained. So what if you went to a yoga class instead of whatever kind of thing you're doing now? What if you went for a walk in the forest? What if you went to a meditation class?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Would you actually have a better body and a better mind? It's entirely possible.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
A lot of people, especially high stress entrepreneurs, they'll go to the gym to burn off excess adrenaline and cortisol. In fact, special forces people, after an operation, they will go to the gym and just kill it for an hour just to dump all their stress hormones.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If you're using exercise to deal with the stress, maybe you should find out where the stress is coming from and do something about that. Or you might be doing it because you're addicted to endorphins. And I know people like, if I don't go for a run every day, I'm just, I'm not happy. You know what happens to those guys as they age?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
They get new knees and new hips because going for a five mile run every day is not good for your body over time. And if you can't deal with reality, unless you basically go out and exercise with high intensity every single day, something's probably not right. And I respect the desire to be stronger and faster, and I share it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
What I'm proposing is you want to be able to do that and be in a place of peace and power, and it shouldn't take an hour a day. And if you just love running, do it as long as you can, but it does come at a cost.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Well, grass-fed red meat is the healthiest meat that most people can eat. And there's three reasons that people become vegan and none of them are valid scientifically. One of them is saying, I don't want there to be suffering in animals. Okay. Number one,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If you're eating a soy burger or one of those impossible things, there are large threshers and tractors that go through the field and they cut up every animal. So there's dead baby deer, turtles, salamanders, mice, butterflies, snakes, all the things.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If they're even still alive on that land, because unless you're eating organic stuff, the land has been sterilized by glyphosate and things like that. So the deaths per calorie is from a vegan thing are much, much higher than if you eat a pound of grass fed meat every day. Because that cow, it was just one life for you to eat for an entire year.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And that means you can buy it from a small farmer who treated the cow with respect. I built and ran a regenerative farm for 10 years on Vancouver Island. I've raised my own animals and eaten them for a long time. So there is not an ethical argument around killing. You're killing more animals with your fake food. The health argument, vegans get sick all the time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
These plant things suck minerals out of your bones. The more vegan you are, the more you need more minerals in your diet. So that doesn't work very well. And you don't have the right fat and your testosterone is low and you feel ungrounded. And there's a reason that people make jokes about vegans being highly emotionally reactive.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I say this as a former raw vegan, you're ungrounded because you don't have any minerals in your body. So those don't work. So it's not health. It's not animals. And then this ridiculous environmental argument. Grass-fed animals build soil. Soil is the largest carbon sink on the planet. I put the first $50,000 into the Carbon Capture XPRIZE that Elon Musk funded for $100 million.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And we can pull carbon out of the air. We're not going to do it with industrial farming for plant-based things. We're going to do it by restoring our soil, which requires animals. So why should you eat meat? It is the right kind of fat, the right kind of protein, and it's mineral rich, and it's actually good for the environment. We just need to fix our animal agriculture.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And if you look at chickens, the kind of heritage chickens that I raise take nine months to reach full size. The kind that you're eating takes six weeks to reach full size, and they have no minerals in them. They have very little nutrients, and they torture those animals. And you can eat one chicken a day. So you want to kill 365 animals a year? You don't want to kill one animal a year.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And from a spiritual shamanic perspective, at 40 Years of Zen, we do a lot of spiritual stuff. I've done shamanic training. I've met with meditation gurus and learned from them all over the world. The reality is that from a spiritual perspective, I believe animals or farm animals come here to experience gratitude. And this is why all societies practice saying grace or saying something grateful.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
We're getting to that point. And it's funny, when I was 24 and I was building out my tech entrepreneur career, I went to the hairdresser. I'm like, can you give me some gray right here on the sides? And they're like, why would you ever want that? We don't have gray hair dye.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So when I'm going to eat that beautiful grass-fed ribeye that I'm going to eat after this show, I'm going to take about 10 seconds, say, hey, thanks cow. And then it's complete. So if you want to feel better, I'm not even kidding. Add a pound of steak a day for a week and watch how your life changes. Eating that much red meat
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Eating one gram of animal protein per pound of body weight has the same effect on your biology as taking semaglutide or one of the GLP-1 drugs. That costs $1,000 a month to do that stuff. And I have used GLP one time for a podcast. I've never used it. And how many people walk around at 4.8% body fat, especially with a history of obesity? It's unheard of. And I'm not using pharmaceuticals to do it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I'm using beef.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Well, the people who say meat stay around in your stomach all the time, I've seen that stuff as well. It's nonsense. And all you have to do is go to any doctor who does colonoscopies. They look with a camera inside your colon, and there is no meat in your colon. The sides are pink. It's just not there. Now, what does stick around your colon and rot is plants.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
It turns out the lowest residue food you can eat is meat. You eat meat, almost all of it's digested, and there's very little left over. And contrast that with a bowl of kale or whole grains, neither of which I eat. what you're going to find is tons of undigestible matter that is rotting in the gut. Ideally, it's fermenting and making good stuff, but that oftentimes doesn't happen.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And there is no evidence that meat sticks around your gut. That's just a wives' tale because it does get fully digested. Also, if you're eating too much meat and your body doesn't make enough enzymes, you will have the worst farts ever, in which case you need to fix your digestion because meat absorbs completely.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And then cholesterol, even the American Heart Association, the worst job ever of doing their mission. Well, they say that cholesterol in food is a nutrient of non-concern. They've said eating cholesterol doesn't harm you at all. And these are the most skeptical people on the planet. And cholesterol is the precursor for all of your sex hormones, for your stress hormones.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Low cholesterol people, including what happens when you're vegan, they die more from all-cause mortality. The longest-lived humans have higher LDL and higher HDL. And when you eat the way I've been teaching entrepreneurs and others to eat for 10-plus years now, you get enough saturated fat You get enough animal protein. Your resilience goes up and your inflammation goes down.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And I said, well, I know that I'm going to make $20,000 a year more when I go into a job because they're going to say, oh, he has experience. And so you want to look like you have enough experience for people to take you seriously, because if you look like you're 25 and you're 45, you're not going to be given the kind of respect you think.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Your HDL, which is the protective kind of cholesterol, goes up and your LDL largely doesn't matter in that thing. And I teach people with the Axo Health app here are the markers to pay attention to. If you're worried about, oh no, I ate some butter, I might die. Well, number one, that's what we've been eating throughout all of history and people didn't get heart attacks until recently.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
But let's say you're still, just test the markers that tell you whether there's damage to the lining of your arteries. It's pretty easy to do.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Oh, my God.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
All right. If you were to walk outside into your backyard or into the forest, pick a plant, just a random one, and chew it up and swallow it, you know what's going to happen? You're probably going to the hospital or maybe just to the bathroom. Most plants are so toxic you can't eat them. Right. And so there's well, those aren't the edible plants. OK, just because something is edible.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Do you think all edible plants are 100 percent edible or does each plant come with pros and cons? We know that that's the case. So can you survive on a plant to get energy, even though it's also delivering toxins? Of course you can. That's one of the things that's made our species so powerful, because during famines we can eat all sorts of stuff. It just comes at a cost.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
In my first big biohacking book, in the first chapter, I wrote about these five big toxins that are affecting your performance that come from plants. And lectins cause inflammation differently for different people. These are plant defense compounds. And the most famous lectin is called sarin nerve gas. And this is something that terrorists have used for creating chaos. And it comes from beans.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So lectins can be really good or really bad for you. You just don't know, depending on your genetics. So minimizing lectins for a brief period, if suddenly your joints don't hurt anymore, that's a big sign. The one that people oftentimes miss is called phytic acid. This is present in whole grains and legumes.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And phytic acid steals minerals, including calcium and zinc and a lot of the other ones, from your bones and from your mitochondria. It's such a problem that when farmers feed chickens or cows grain, they have to measure the phytic acid level because the cows or chickens will have such soft bones they can't stand. So then they give them special enzymes to block this.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And those animals can digest phytic acid and humans can't. And then there's oxalate, which is a huge issue. And these are all in the first chapter of the Bulletproof Diet. And oxalates... are compounds that cause razor sharp calcium crystals to form throughout your body. And we can handle about 200 milligrams a day.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
One spinach, kale, beet, almond smoothie can have five times the amount your body can handle. And when you're young, it doesn't cause damage. You might get some skin irritation or a little bit of soreness, but they stick around in the body over time. And 70% of kidney stones are caused by plants, not by eating animals.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And in entrepreneurship, it matters less, except if you're going in with a bunch of old, stodgy government bureaucrats and trying to sell them your new service. They want to see that you've got enough experience. So there's probably around 30 to 35 is where you want to be pinned in terms of how you look and how you think.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
When people lower oxalate in their diet by getting rid of the weird, freaky superfoods, eating less whole grains, eat white rice instead of whole grains if you want a grain, what happens? And they eat less spinach, less kale, even red raspberries. All of a sudden, their brains work better. They don't have cravings. Their joints don't hurt. Their skin clears up.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So there's, okay, could you eat those foods and survive? Yes. Is that going to be an improvement in your quality of life? No. So what I recommend people do is eat the low toxin plants and eat grass-fed meat. And for carbs, you eat the kinds of fruit that are lower in toxins. And you eat some rice, you eat some honey. And if you do that, you're going to be fine.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And maybe some sweet potatoes, maybe some white potatoes. Those both have toxins depending on whether you're sensitive or not. So I'm not asking for perfection. I'm just saying that if you make... A few changes to minimize, just to recognize that some plants are probably causing your digestive problems and your skin problems. Stop them for a little while and watch how life changes.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
The reason you do this as an entrepreneur is that if something's causing inflammation in your gut and you think it's good for you and it's not, and your gut's inflamed, your brain's inflamed. When your brain's inflamed, someone's going to do something stupid in your company and you're going to get pissed off at them. You're going to yell at them.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And then the whole day, the whole company is disrupted. So you have to manage your biology if you want to be the leader of your company.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
It's more about avoiding the most likely harmful foods than it is eating the good foods. The best thing is grass-fed meat. And you can get grass-fed hamburger. You can get grass-fed steak. It really matters that it's grass-fed for a whole bunch of complex reasons, including environmental and including your own health. But grass-fed meat, and then instead of spinach, have lettuce or arugula.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Those are good for you. Be careful with the nightshade family, which is potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers. There are so many people, 28% of rheumatoid arthritis is caused by those plants. So don't eat them for a week, and then eat them again and see what happened. You may be completely immune to them, or like many, many people, you go, oh, wait, when I don't eat those...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
My brain is clearer, my skin is clearer, and my digestion is better. My joints don't hurt. And then in terms of carbohydrates, white rice. The reason white rice is so much better than brown rice is that brown rice contains way more arsenic and way more inflammatory compounds in the gut.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And this is why in every rice eating culture, people who can afford it eat white rice and only the poorest peasants eat brown rice. There's more calories in brown rice because you keep the lining of the rice, the outer shell, the husk, but that's bad for you. It's better than starving, but it's not a superfood.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Because by the time you're mid-30s, you figured out enough stuff to not do the things you would have done when you were 22 or 25. And I think that's where you maximize your value as a business partner. And it's fine if you're 50. In fact, you probably have more experience, but it's better if you have the experience of being 50. They think you're 35 and then you just outplay them.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And if a restaurant tries to charge more for brown rice, you should tell them to go screw themselves. Eat the white rice if you're going to eat carbs like that. Don't eat refined sugar. It's not good for you. If you find you need more carbs, honey and fruit. And don't eat a zero-carb diet all the time. It's bad for you. Don't eat carbs every day. It's bad for you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And every now and then, skip breakfast or skip dinner. Do some intermittent fasting three days a week. Intermittent fasting starts at 12 hours a day of not eating. Have an earlier dinner, have a later breakfast, and you'll be fine.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Danger Coffee is a new idea. It's called Danger because who knows what you might do. It is the good kind of danger, the kind of danger that entrepreneurs are attracted to. To make it, it is lab tested mold free because the mold toxin that's found in coffee very commonly, especially in the U.S. In fact, recent studies just came out.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
It directly inhibits mitochondrial function, which means it takes your energy. So if you drink coffee and it needs sugar and then you feel tweaked a while later and you want more coffee, it's probably the toxins from mold in the coffee. So danger coffee is mold free. Brands I've worked with in the past no longer say mold-free on the label. They just say clean, whatever that means.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And what's biggest about Danger Coffee, there is a therapeutic dose of trace minerals and electrolytes in the coffee. It's a very high-end, amazing flavor coffee. But Danger Coffee has those minerals and those minerals help your body make electricity.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So if you're going to make a cup of coffee in the morning, it might as well give you a therapeutic dose of trace minerals that your body needs to make energy in your cells and you feel different. People say, oh my gosh, it doesn't need sugar. No, it's because it's really good coffee. It tastes great. But the minerals do something different in the body. You can add butter. You can add MCT.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
You can blend it up or not. It still creates a very different coffee experience.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
One thing you could do today to be more profitable tomorrow is find an older person over 70 and ask them for advice because they have suffered way more than you have and they will tell you for free what to do.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
The most important secret to profiting in life is It's to understand that you're not investing dollars, you're investing energy, and then you're investing time, and then you're investing suffering, and then you're investing dollars. So look at it as how much energy did I put in and how much energy did I get out of it? If that is the thing that you measure,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
it'll directly lead to more joy and more happiness and the sense that you're resilient and you can handle everything. But if you only focus on dollars, every time you get more dollars, it won't make you happier.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
You can go to dangercoffee.com to check out the coffee. And all of my stuff is at daveasprey.com. And if you feel called to go deep with me on neuroscience over five days in Seattle with the world's top brain upgrade facility, 40yearsofzen.com.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Thanks, Hala.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And that's what biohacking really is about. Now I have the body I want without a lot of work because if you do that, you're captain of your own ship and it changes everything.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Wow. I do everything. So I wrote a major book on longevity called Superhuman that outlines all of this. And there's seven pillars of aging. And you'll get, well, what's the most unusual thing? Recently, I went down to Costa Rica and I reset my central aging clock.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And what that means is I sat every day for a couple hours with focused ultrasound beams hitting the hypothalamus in my brain while getting stem cells so they could actually cross the blood-brain barrier. And the effect on cognitive function is really powerful. If you've looked at aging lately, you've seen people say, we can reverse cell aging. OK, that's nice.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
But if your brain thinks you're old and your brain actually is aging and your cells are less old, OK, you've got some of the longevity. But having a young brain, having done a ton of neurofeedback on my brain to train it to be more effective, to be more powerful and to be more efficient at the same time, that combination is pretty incredible.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And I do all the other stuff you'd expect, like tons of stem cells. and making sure my cognitive systems work epically well. The cool thing is as you age, your brain slows down a little bit unless you do something about it, then we can measure that. So I have the average response time in my brain of an 18 year old. So whatever I'm doing is working.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Biohacking, the definition when I first came out with this, it's the art and science of changing the environment around you and then inside of you so you have control of your own biology. And the areas that we play in are longevity, which is a big focus for me, cognitive function, and then I'm going to call it the spiritual or the happiness side of things.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
What you would do is you would, and then you make sure of animal protein right after you work out.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And I've been putting a lot of weighting of my effort behind those three areas. And you'll see a lot of people who maybe are newer to the biohacking scene. They read a bunch of stuff and decide they want to write a book or start a podcast. And the reason I didn't trademark the word biohacking is I wanted it to be a global movement. I don't own biohacking. I just started it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
People call me the father of biohacking. So I do see people who are saying I'm just a longevity person and there's a longevity conference. And then I'll see people say, well, I'm a biohacker. I just have some red light and some cold plunges. I'm like, those are very old biohacks. That's great. And all of these are helping people.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
What's maybe most refreshing is that biohacking has crushed the vegan diet. And having been a raw vegan at one time in my life, which is really bad for you, what inspires me the most is I write all of my posts, all my podcasts.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Grass-fed red meat is the healthiest meat that most people can eat.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If someone had just told me this when I was 20, it would have saved me $2.5 million, and it would have saved me an enormous amount of suffering, both the spiritual, emotional suffering and physical suffering, having lost 100 pounds, having made my brain work better than it ever has. So I try to keep it balanced. It also comes down to what's your goal?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Because the things that make old people young are the things that make young people powerful. So let's say you're 30 and you say, oh my gosh, I'm going to do biohacking. Now I have the body I want without a lot of work. Because if you're an entrepreneur, you don't have time to spend 10 hours a day on longevity and going to the gym because you're actually building a company.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
You probably have some sort of romantic interest and you're balancing all this. You could also meditate for four hours a day and... We just don't have time for that. So how do I make it really effective? And how do I make it take a small amount of time for my brain to work, for me to have epic levels of energy and just more resilience than anyone else? And if you can do that,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
you will be really successful, not just in your entrepreneurial life, but in your personal life. And it depends on how many friends you have of different ages. Show me an entrepreneur who's killing it at work when their relationship is falling apart at home. It doesn't work. So your relationships are a part of your environment that affects you as a biohacker. So we want happiness.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
We want the ability to be in whatever state we choose, whether it's focused or relaxed, so no one can trigger us. You can't do just one thing. You have to have brain, you have to have energy, you need to have your body, you need to have your longevity. It's just a lot easier and cheaper to do this if you start in your 20s or 30s than if you wait till you're 40 or 50.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Wow, I do everything.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
You know, there's always been seventh grade bullies who don't like something, so they just insult it instead of saying something meaningful. And you can say biohacking is non-scientific, except there's this weird thing we do called science as biohackers. Say, I wanted to get this result. So what are the things that have scientific studies behind them or just have clinical evidence behind them?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Let's try those and measure the results. And when someone says biohacking isn't scientific, these are the same kind of people that will say A-B testing your ads online is not scientific. What do you mean it's not scientific? I tried it and it worked or it didn't work.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And the thing about being an entrepreneur for my entire life, if you believe something is going to work in your business and you just keep doing it despite the evidence, you will go out of business. So if you think billboards are going to be a great way of advertising, you put a million dollars into billboards and you don't sell anything. You go, well, I believe billboards work.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Let me put another million in. But we do this all the time with our stupid oatmeal in the morning, with kale and with our health. And then these arrogant pharmaceutical-backed people go, well, biohacking is not scientific. I'm like, guys, the whole point of biohacking is I'm only going to do what works and I'm going to measure results the same way I do in my business.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I'm going to do it for my sleep, for my stress, for my inflammation, for my aging. And if I'm doing something wrong, I'll change it. How is that unscientific? It's the most obvious thing on the planet. What's going on here? There's a lot of people with a vested interest in you not having the data and you not having the knowledge and you're not even having the right to control your own biology.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So you can insult biohacking all you want. There are tens of millions of biohackers all over the planet. I'm hosting my biohacking conference here in Austin, 4,000 people in May. biohackingconference.com and more than 100 vendors. This is depending on which analysts you like. Biohacking is now probably a $16 billion industry going up to $63 billion.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I don't know if I believe the analysts, but I even coach hundreds of entrepreneurs at the business of biohacking event I put on. And the whole point here is this is an industry and we are not medical, although a lot of doctors are doing biohacking because it complements medical. And my biohacking facility is called Upgrade Labs. 32 locations open across the U.S. and Canada.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And we're partnering with entrepreneurs all over the place who are saying, I want to bring biohacking to my community using AI, using data. And there's not even a mirror in my biohacking facilities. At Upgrade Labs, your only mirror is your data. How am I actually doing? There's no self-deception. There's no religious belief.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Oh, you know, I saw an ad from a drug company or from Kraft Foods or General Mills telling me Froot Loops was part of a healthy breakfast. So I just believed it. I kept eating Froot Loops and getting fat. This is what they want. But entrepreneurs, one of the gifts we have is we want to make the world a better place. And we don't really suffer bullshit. Right.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So sure, you can say biohacking is elitist too, because sleeping in a dark room is elitist. Having dimmer switches is elitist. Lowering your thermostat is elitist. Eating healthy food is elitist. Or is this just the manual for being a healthy, effective human? That's what I believe. Most biohacks are based on principles that are free. All of my books have the free version. the cheap version.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And here's what the crazy billionaires are doing in order to prove that it works. And yes, I do all the crazy billionaire stuff because that's my job and I get to do it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I just want to share things. It makes me feel good to help people. I didn't understand that flow states come from service to others because we didn't have the science for that. So all of a sudden, I'm motivated to stay up late and write these blog posts and to share this knowledge and to start a podcast. before podcasts were really much of a thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I've been blessed to be, I don't know if it's genetic or something, but I'm a futurist. I can see what's coming and like podcasts. Yeah, that's going to be, it's going to be a big thing. And it's why I was successful in tech as well, because I could say I could tell the direction of it. And if some people are good at telling the weather, that's what I do. I tell the future. And so for this podcast,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
This just seemed like it mattered.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I wanted to do it for no financial motivation whatsoever. I just didn't want anyone to suffer the way I had. No other motivation. And now it's made me pretty successful.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Hold on a second here. You're trying to cut me short. It's at least 180. Oh, that's not the ceiling. That's the floor. Just so we're clear. Okay.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Here's why it's possible. Do you know what the best we can do today is?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
There you go. It's about 120, 122 maybe. So our current best is 120. If you were 120 years old today, you were born around 1901. We didn't have airplanes. World War I would be fought largely on horseback. We didn't have DNA because we couldn't spell it. Actually, we had it. We just didn't know about it. We had no antibiotics. We didn't have public sanitation and you still live to 120.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So if that's possible and you probably drank and smoked every day too. Okay. If you can do that, why can't we do 50% better than our current best in the next hundred years? Hmm. OK, because the next hundred years is going to be way different than the last hundred years, because the last hundred years we did not have computers to make ourselves faster and better.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
What we're doing now is every 18 months we double our compute capacity. That's Moore's law, and it's held strong for ridiculous amounts of time. What that means is that you and I are going to live longer because we have the technology to talk about living longer that we didn't have before. And my company, 40 Years of Zen.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
that does neuroscience brain upgrades has the ability to do machine learning on your brain waves. One of the companies I am an investor and advisor to, Viome, just discovered 10,000 new species of gut bacteria that didn't exist, that live in humans, that we didn't know about. And it's 2020, whatever it is today, right? That is phenomenal. So given all of that,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
If a comet doesn't hit the planet, it is inevitable that we will improve only 50% on our current best in the next 100 years. In fact, we'll do way better than that. My job is to explain and make it real so that everyone knows this is possible and it is coming. And so it becomes our expectation. The same thing happened if you go back to when the Wright brothers were about to fly.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
They're working on flying machines and everyone looks around and goes, those idiots, who do they think they are? Don't they know man will never fly? Literally, they were saying that a week before it happened. And then all of a sudden it happens. And then, oh, yeah, of course we can do that. It's always been that way.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When I was a kid, I had all the behavioral problems that are common in entrepreneurs, what we would now call ADHD. But I also had Asperger's syndrome, which is a neurological condition, and it's on the autism spectrum. I don't present as someone with Asperger's anymore, and I, in fact, don't likely have it because it is a curable condition. It's related to autoimmunity. I was also overweight.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So every great change that is brought about, usually by entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs in combination with crazy inventors, when they pair up, it's very it's very powerful. And when that happens magically, suddenly it's obvious. And we're at that stage right now with anti-aging.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When I started this, I was the only person under 30 attending a meeting, a nonprofit that was based next door to Stanford University called the Silicon Valley Health Institute. I ended up becoming chairman. I'm learning from an 88-year-old and I'm 26. And he had more energy than I did at the time. Okay. What? These guys were considered truly crazy.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And so did the people who talked about smart drugs. Where we are now with nootropics, nootropics are a thing and people know that they work. And I played a hand in that as well. I went on Nightline and said, guys, I took a smart drug called modafinil for eight years, which is the limitless drug. And it got me through Wharton Business School. And I don't regret it one bit. It was a beautiful thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I don't need it anymore because my brain's that fast without it. By the way, have you noticed...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I kissed a Smurf. I use a compound called methylene blue, which I've written about in a couple of my books that enhances mitochondrial function. It's a nootropic. It's just one that makes your tongue blue.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I had chronic fatigue syndrome, which was diagnosed by a couple of people, fibromyalgia, thyroid problems, lower testosterone than my mom in my 20s in labs, high risk of stroke and heart attack before I was 30, arthritis when I was 14. So I think I was pretty much, you could say biologically a shit show as a kid. I don't know if I can say that on here.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
There is a maximum life. Absolutely. So there's two of them. The longest one is the universe, as we understand it, will collapse in on itself. There's probably going to be a hard limit that's based on physics and stuff like that. I'm less worried about that. The real limit to human lifespan is curiosity.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
As long as you have a reason to live, to be of service to others, to be curious about things, to be constantly learning and walking around with that childlike curiosity going, I wonder why that works. How is it that way? How can I make that better? If you have the biology so that when you're old, you look and feel like you do now.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We're not talking about the skin so thin you can see through it with tubes and monitors and diapers and not knowing your own name. People think that's aging. That is an aberration. It has never existed in all of human history, except for in the last maybe 40, 50 years. And it's sick and wrong.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So we are on the path of returning to having our village elders, the keepers of the knowledge and returning them to. to what is right, which is a level of respect and veneration for our elders, because they will keep us from making mistakes. And here's why this matters. You look back to when I made that $6 million, or even better yet, when I sold that first t-shirt online.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Now, I was exactly the same age as Marc Andreessen, who's a really famous investor, multi-multi-billionaire. Now, Marc created the first web browser. I did the first e-commerce. Very similar, about as similar as you can. In fact, I wrote an article as a journalist about his first web browser. So we're in the same thing. He flew to Silicon Valley. I would have had to drive.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I was 80 miles from Silicon Valley. But he flew to Silicon Valley and he found a guy 20 years older who ran one of the large tech companies and said, teach me. And he did. What did I do? I said, I'll do it all myself. I knew everything. Right. I had a big ego. Right. So I did not do that. And at this point, Mark's a multibillionaire and I'm not. OK, I'm OK with that. I'm doing quite well.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You can beat me out or something, but not in a good place. That said, I did, let's see, I was at the top of my class in high school, but I was such a jerk that they wouldn't let me be valedictorian.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Thank you very much. But it took me another 10 or 15 years to figure out the value of mentorship and to basically get control of my ego so that I could listen to and learn from others. So I'd have to make all the mistakes myself. That's a really, really big thing. We can do that with aging. We can do that with everything, but it comes down to curiosity and willingness to learn.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And we've, we've just got to get that. That's what keeps you young. So once you're bored, even if you have the biology, the real goal of anti-aging, you should die at a time and by a method of your choice. When you're done, you're done.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I love it that you brought up Alzheimer's. My book, Headstrong, was on the New York Times monthly science bestseller list sandwiched between Homo Deus and Sapiens, two of my other favorite books. I'm like, oh, I finally made the big list. I look at me. I'm a big deal. But I was just sort of in awe going, oh, my God, I can't believe that happened. I wasn't expecting it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But that book is largely based on research around Alzheimer's. And I've had Dale Bredesen on my podcast who wrote The End of Alzheimer's. And I was a couple years ago, the largest donor to the women's Alzheimer's movement, which is Maria Shriver's charity. She's been on my show as well. Women get Alzheimer's twice as much as men do. And we don't talk about that nearly as much as we should.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Alzheimer's is preventable and avoidable. It's not even that hard, given what we know now. But But reversing it is a little bit more work. And if you're a late stage, it might not be reversible.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But if you in your mind today listening to this saying, oh, it's inevitable that I'm going to get cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Alzheimer's, which are the big four killers that you have to avoid to live a long time. You're totally wrong. These are metabolic diseases. You can fix your metabolism.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
That's not to say that I was doing that well in high school. I was just at a school that wasn't that competitive.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
In fact, my newest startup, the one where I'm CEO and fully focused now is called Upgrade Labs. And we're opening franchise locations across the US and Canada to start and soon the world where you can come in and fix your metabolism in less time than you currently spend going to the gym.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So you get your cardio, get your strength, get your neurofeedback and fix your metabolism because we know how, because of machine learning, because of artificial intelligence, because of tech. So you can do better than Caveman did. And this is all necessary if you don't want to go down that path of slow degradation that is not natural.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Here's the deal. OK. It is ageist to talk about someone's age. Right. So if I am allowed to specify the gender I identify as and I'm allowed to choose the race I identify as, I'll be damned if I'm not allowed to choose the age I identify as. I'm 28 percent right now. I'm 28% of my goal. So I'm not 49, not 48. So I'm 28%. And everyone listening, get this, pick a number. That's your goal.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You are the percentage of that. And if you believe in this whole, oh, identify with a calendar. No, screw the calendar. The calendar is wrong. If you measure my biology, I am measurably younger than my number of years. So that's what I identify as.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's awesome.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
All right. Well, it depends on which... which measure of age you want to look at. And right now, there isn't one accepted thing. I just did a big show on this. And one of the probably more trustworthy tests is called TrueAge. And this is one that looks at the types of sugar molecules that line your cells. And it looks at DNA methylation.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Actually, those are two different methods of looking at aging. So you look at those things and I am between five and eight years younger than my biological age right now. And when I get the new tests, I would not be surprised if now it's going to be about 12 years because I just did some more interventions that are lengthening telomeres.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But telomere length, which is the old way of measuring aging, probably probably isn't as accurate as we hoped it would be. So there's all sorts of discussions about it. But the number one thing is, do you wake up and you have more energy than you did 20 years ago? That's a pretty good sign that something's working, right? And do you wake up and your body hurts?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
That's a sign something's not working. So like you, you have an unfair advantage. See, I started out with bad genetics and bad lifestyle that I thought was a good lifestyle. And I recovered from all that. You are preventing the damage in the first place because you're in your 30s. And we know more now than we did when I was in my 30s. And you actually took action early in your life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Most people are like, are you kidding? Here's what I care about in my 20s. I care about having enough money to make sure that I get laid. Sorry, human development, all personal development right there. People care about power and they care about reproduction. Not because we choose to, because our biology does that for us when we're not paying attention.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then we're like, oh, why did I go on the date instead of the job interview? You just blame yourself when you think you're a bad person. No, it's because your biology told you to do that. And your biology is in charge more than we like to think. And this is the struggle of personal development.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So whatever you did, whatever your parents did that made you wise enough to take care of your hardware means that your rate of aging is going to be flat forever. Whereas someone who says, I'm just going to go party and drink way more than I should and eat ramen all the time because it's cheap, their rate of aging is going to be really steep. They just don't feel it until they're 35.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So kudos to you. And I want everyone to not do what I did when I was 16 because I just didn't do it right.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Before we get there, I didn't answer your last question.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I have spent, at this point, around $2 million on anti-aging, on upgrading my biology. Part of that, I built a lab here at my house that has all of the gear that is now a part of Upgrade Labs. So when you're able to go to an Upgrade Labs, or if you open an Upgrade Labs franchise in your neighborhood, a lot of the gear there, well, I bought all that gear, and I've spent...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
God knows how much on lab testing, on traveling around the world and trying all of the anti-aging technologies that billionaires are doing right now. And that was the subject of Superhuman, which is my big anti-aging book that tells you all of the stuff that you can do now, including the free stuff.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah. Yeah. In fact, it seems to make people mad when I talk about that. In the early days of the Internet, I mean, early days before web browsers were created, it was entirely possible to know everything on the Internet because it was something called Usenet was where most people communicated and you could follow all of the groups. And these were kind of like Reddit forums today.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So the problem is that when you're young, you're not going to spend $100,000 on a stem cell treatment. It doesn't even make sense because you don't need to because you have young stem cells, right? So that's part of it. But there are things you can do now that we know what's making you older.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
The things you could do that are free that give you the advantages so you can hold off on spending lots more money as you age in order to not age. So the biggest one you can do that has the highest ROI is intermittent fasting, which is my latest book.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Wow, it's sort of like, okay, you have a car and you wanna keep your car running for a long time. So what was more important, changing the oil or rotating the tires?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
probably both important like if you don't rotate the tires you're going to have a blowout and flip the car and that's no good right but if you don't change the oil the engine's going to wear out before it's time so which one's more important it's really hard for me to say that but i will tell you that having a healthy metabolism that makes energy very effectively from air plus food if you can hack that system everything else including your cognition your meditation your personal development
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Your rate of aging, your DNA methylation, all of it will be better. So fixing your metabolism would be the number one thing. And of all the things I've done, which fixed it? A lot. Supplements are important. You absolutely need to be taking supplements. The reason is straightforward.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You'll never get all of your nutrients from food because that presupposes you get all of your toxins from Mother Nature. You live in a world that is not the natural world. You need to support the systems in your body for the world you live in. That's why you use supplements. The other thing is intermittent fasting, brief periods of exercise, not over exercising is also very important.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And so those are some of the very basic cheap things. And frankly, sleeping, learning how to sleep. When I was a young entrepreneur on sleep, why would I do that? I could learn instead of sleep. So I would sleep five hours a night sometimes because I had work, I had things to do. The ROI on sleep is very high.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But a new study came out literally two days before we recorded this that showed sleeping more than six and a half hours a night is related to negative changes neurologically. The correct amount of time for high performance, healthy people who are not under undue stress is about six and a half hours a night. I went from five hours. Sorry.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I went from five minutes of deep sleep and five minutes of REM sleep. in a six and a half hour period 15 years ago to getting an hour and a half to two hours of deep sleep and an hour and a half to two hours of REM sleep. That is more sleep than a 20 year old gets in eight hours. I'm getting as a 48 year old who identifies as a 28 year old in six and a half hours. So less sleep, but more quality.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
That in and of itself is your biggest anti-aging strategy right now. So learn how to sleep and learn how to skip breakfast. Those two things are going to buy you 20 years, even if you don't spend any money on it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Fasting means to go without. That's it. And people say, well, fasting means you can have no calories. You can only have water. because that's what mice did in a study. Like, well, I hate to tell you, there's something called dry fasting. That's when you fast without water too. So which is the real fasting? Right.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But imagine if Reddit only had 100 forums. OK, you could follow all those if you wanted to spend a good amount of time doing it. So I did go out there. I had a, let's just say it was a nine times increase in my tuition at the university of California. Uh, when I was on Joe Rogan show, I said it was 15 times. I had made a math error. That was the only error that I had on that show.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Well, there is no real definition other than the one I just gave, which is to go without. You can fast from alcohol. It's called abstaining. You can fast from sex. It's called chastity or celibacy, whatever you want to call it. And you can fast from hate, which is called compassion meditation. It's called forgiveness.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
All of those are practices of fasting, saying I am not going to do X for some period of time. And it turns out when fasting from food, it's not even fasting from calories. It's fasting from specific types of calories that cause metabolic changes you don't want. So I wrote the first book, which is about fasting for performance, a working fast versus fasting for a spiritual fast.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I fasted in a cave for four days led by a shaman who was remote from me. So I'm all by myself because I knew that if I didn't eat, this was going back to 2008, If I didn't eat six meals a day, I would go into starvation mode, which is not a real thing. And then that would make me fat and some bizarre mental gymnastics taught to me by big food.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I also knew that I would get hypoglycemic, which meant that if I didn't eat often, I would yell at everyone around me because I would get cranky. So I'm like, put me in a cave. No food, no one to yell at. Everybody wins. And the book is actually based on the psychology of fasting plus the physiology of fasting. And I say, here's how to fast without pain.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So you work better than you did before and you save money and time in the morning.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
and then here's what to do on a weekend or when you want to do a spiritual fast and today 70 000 people have done the free fasting training the challenge that comes with the book fastestway.com is where that is and i just want people to learn if you skip breakfast the right way you're nicer to the people around you you're more focused than you were before your metabolism gets better you're less likely to get diabetes and cancer and alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease and you save money and time
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Like it's the best, highest return on investment hack there is.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So anyway, I couldn't pay for it. So I'm going to start a business here. What can I do? Well, I like caffeine. So I emailed a caffeine scientist and said, tell me about the caffeine molecule. And I'm whatever, 19 or something. And. he tells me a bunch of stuff. So I made a t-shirt and said, caffeine, my drug of choice with a picture of the caffeine molecule.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I posted to the discussion group where we talked about coffee and said, you guys should buy this. And then, Oh, two weeks later. And I did really well. I sold shirts in my first month to 16 countries and, And OK, I'm living in a shared one bedroom apartment that I can barely afford, like not not the the, you know, college experience that someone who's having their college paid for would have.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's not true.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And the reason the book is called Fast This Way is that there isn't one way. It's biologically unique. So let's just suppose that last night you went out and you maybe had a few drinks with friends and you stayed up till midnight, right? And then you woke up this morning and said, I'm going to fast. You already blew out your biology. You messed with your sleep. You had alcohol.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You probably ate way late. Maybe you worked out the day before too. So you're already at a point of biological stress. Adding fasting as a stressor on top of a stressed body isn't going to work very well. Have some breakfast. It's OK. Right. And then let's say that another day you went to bed on time. You didn't have a late dinner and you didn't have a bright TV in your eyes and whatever.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So you wake up and you're just fully charged and you're ready to go. Maybe you should fast for more than six hours. The evidence shows at least a 12-hour fast three days a week, this is in women over 40 specifically, creates metabolic benefits. So for most people, most days, at least 14 hours without food is a good idea. However, 14 hours, I would starve. No, when you're asleep counts.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's like have dinner, earlier dinners are better. So have dinner at five. Let's say you're done eating at six. If you don't eat snacks and dessert after that and you wake up at 6 a.m., you already fasted 12 hours. You could just wait two more hours and you did a 14-hour fast. So you have breakfast at 8. It's not that big of a deal. But that midnight snack ruins you biologically.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And if you're saying, okay, I can go past 8. I'm just going to wait and have some breakfast-y kind of thing at 10. Well, you just did a 16 hour fast. You wait till noon. Oh my God, you did an 18 hour fast, 18 six fast. That's what all the paleo people do. It's not that hard, but here's when it's hard. And I say this as a guy who was obese for much of my life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
If when you wake up, you have a gnawing hunger, and all you can do is think about food, and you go into the office, and someone has a plate of donuts there, the donut's gonna win. It's gonna say, eat me, and you're gonna say, no. And it's gonna say, eat me, and you're gonna say, no. And the conversation gets more and more shrill, and it's like arguing with a two-year-old.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Eventually, they're just gonna wear you down, and you go, fine, I'll eat half, and you have just a bite of donut. And then you go, God damn it. Why am I such a bad person? I'm so weak. No, biology dictates that this will happen to you, especially when you're not a fat adapted. We don't have a flexible metabolism.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So what I teach people to do in the fasting challenge or by reading the book, but the fasting challenge is free fast this way.com. It's look, there are things you can do that turn off hunger so that in the morning, I just don't care about food. The donuts are in front of you and there is no voice telling you to eat it because you're like, I don't want it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And it's so much, it's just easier that way. Because what happens is your willpower is a finite resource. And if you spend all of your willpower saying no to donuts, no to your biology, it just keeps asking you because your biology doesn't have what it needs. You're probably not going to have enough left over to be nice to the people around you, to be focused at work, to do what you want to do.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then you're going to beat yourself up and think it was you. So Fast This Way is about the mindset and the physical tools to make yourself never hungry when you're fasting. And then it's just easy.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Autophagy.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
People who read my first big book called The Bulletproof Diet, that's probably more than half a million copies now, 16 languages, and people have lost more than a million pounds on The Bulletproof Diet. It was probably the first modern keto book, except it wasn't just about keto. What ketosis is, is something that happens when you fast or when you only eat fat regularly.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And. I'm thinking, OK, now I can maybe make ends meet. This is really good. And then a Rutgers professor of marketing says no one's ever going to make money on the Internet. So with a chip on my shoulders, an angry, mold exposed kid, I wrote back. So, well, you may be at an Ivy League school, but I'm already making money on the Internet. So you're wrong. Ha ha.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
or maybe very, very small amounts of carbs and protein and all. But it's when your body says, I've got no carbs and no protein to burn. What will I do? I guess I should burn fat. This is a major part of how I lost the 100 pounds of fat that I lost.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
The only problem is that in the Bulletproof Diet, I teach people, here's how to use ketosis for a brief period and then how to switch out of it and then go back in. And if you're saying, I'm only going to eat peanut butter and margarine you're not going to have the same results as if you eat the stuff that I talk about, actually grass-fed butter instead of peanut butter.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So the type of things you eat when you're doing ketosis matters greatly. But essentially, it's fat-burning mode, and we're all capable of it. And if you go into ketosis even briefly – It has a side effect that no one talks about that's so important. When I weighed 300 pounds, there were many times I would lose 30 or 40 pounds and it would come roaring back plus 10.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It happens to anyone who's been fat. And right now it's like 60, 70% of the US is overweight and struggling with exactly what I went through and what I don't ever think about now. And when you go into ketosis, it resets your body's hunger to that of your current body weight.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
If instead you go, oh, I'm going to do what those 1970s people online say, oh, you just have to work out more and eat less and you'll lose weight. No, I tried that. I beat myself up. I gave myself an autoimmune condition doing that. It does not work. You might lose weight for a little bit of time, but it will come back. So what happens there?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You go on ketosis and all of a sudden, if I weighed 300 pounds, I lost 50 pounds with ketosis. I'm still going to have the hunger of a 300-year-old unless I use ketosis, right? So that's why it matters so much. So that's keto. And autophagy is a totally different thing. If you think about Las Vegas, all those lights everywhere, before they turned to LEDs, there were teams, a
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Hundreds of people, their job was to go out and find the dim bulbs and the bulbs that were out and go up on a ladder and take out that bulb and put in a new one so that you didn't have any bulbs out. Well, your body has quadrillions of little power plants and some of them are weaker than others. When you fast, your body goes through and says, what are the weakest ones?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Let me get rid of those, break them down and use them as building blocks to make new, healthy, young mitochondria. So when you fast, you get the benefits of ketosis, weight loss and mental function and a reduction in Alzheimer's. And you get the benefits of autophagy, which is replacing older power plants with younger ones. Oh, and how much did it cost?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You actually got paid to do it because you didn't spend money on breakfast and you didn't spend time on breakfast. It is the simplest thing to just go, oh, this makes sense.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Ramadan.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And the next day, the Miami Herald called. And they wrote about my little business. And pretty soon I'm in Entrepreneur Magazine with a picture of me in a double extra large T-shirt talking about how you can make money on this inner something or another. Two weeks after that, the first spam came out. And I apologize because the people who did that read the article about me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Well, it turns out a lot of the studies I reference in Fast This Way are using Ramadan, which is one of our biggest studies of a certain style of fasting. And it's intermittent dry fasting. It turns out there are health benefits to Ramadan, which are built in. And a lot of the ancient nutritional practices that you'll find through whatever culture you're looking at are around health.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
For instance, the don't eat pork that you find in multiple religions. It's because pork...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
usually had parasites in it and pork that is not refrigerated properly has high levels of histamine which is inflammatory so if you were making rules for your population you'd be like don't eat that stuff because it causes problems a lot of times however if it's preserved properly and it's fed properly it has different effects but they didn't have the technology or the abilities there so they just don't do it right which makes sense now
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
what i would say is that it actually is healthy and there are many many people who practice ramadan and the last thing they have before they go into ramadan right before the sun comes up is a huge cup of bulletproof coffee and they do that because in fastest way i talk about the mechanisms of butter and specifically the mct oil and coffee itself to turn off hunger for long periods of time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So at that point, their ketone levels spike and the ketones suppress hunger. So then they don't think about hunger all day long and get this, when your body is burning fat, guess what a side effect of burning fat is?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Water.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It makes water. That's why camels store fat in their humps. No, they store fat in their humps, but it's water. So they burn the fat in the hump to make water so they don't need to drink water. So if you are in Ramadan and you have ketosis going on, you are hydrating yourselves through burning fat and you're not hungry because you're burning fat. And then it's a much less painful fast.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Now, eating after dark is just not good for you, but that's traditional in the Middle East. I've spent a lot of time in Dubai, been to Oman and have investors in my companies from that part of the world. And I do have a hard time. I have dinner at 10 o'clock at night. I don't sleep as well, but that's because of the intense sun during the day.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So you've got to adjust what you do for where you live.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I do this, next time it's Ramadan, you haven't done this in a long time, connect to your roots, try it for just a week. Just a week, not the whole month. And see if instead of being sluggish, tired, slow, the reason you're sluggish and tired and slow is because what you eat at night is full of sugar and carbs and stuff like that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But when people say, oh, I'm going to practice Ramadan, but I'm going to eat foods that don't cause hunger all day long. Suddenly they just it's like rocket fuel and it's totally sustainable for a month.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And in the article, I warned against marketing on the Internet if you weren't a part of the community. And so the first spammers on Earth were attorneys. Their names were Cantor and Siegel. And if you look back on the history of the Internet, that's how it was. So yeah, I was there. I did it. And I did it one day before the guys who currently run wine.com did it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
16-8 fast means that you don't eat for 16 hours and you eat whatever you want during that eight hours. This is what works for most people most of the time, as long as you don't do too much of it. And it gives you most of the benefits of intermittent fasting, which can be slightly longer, slightly less long.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
One meal a day means what it says. So it's a 24 hour fast every day. In fact, if during Ramadan, you were to say, I'm just going to eat breakfast right before the sun comes up, you'd be doing OMAD. OMAD is fantastic. It gives you more autophagy. However, most people I find who do OMAD every single day for more than especially about five days, their sleep quality goes down.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Women's before men's because women and men actually do fast differently. That's part of the teachings in Fast This Way.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
5-2 fasts. That's a fast where for two days of the week, you either eat very low calories or no calories. And five days, you eat whatever the heck you want, whenever the heck you want. And there's plenty of evidence that says that works. I find it's much less sustainable for long periods of time. Probably doesn't work as well as just skipping breakfast most days.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
spontaneous meal skipping just says, oh, I don't feel like eating. I'm not going to eat. You should always do that. But here's the deal. If you want to eat within four hours of a meal, your last meal was built wrong. You have that kale salad you thought was healthy. No, it wasn't healthy. It just made you hungry. So if you just don't feel like eating, don't eat.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
The problem is that skipping meals doesn't really make it fasting unless you're skipping breakfast or you're skipping dinner because you just aren't getting that 12 hour plus window of having no food.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
There is something I call the fasting trap. And it's the same as the exercise trap. It's the same as the keto trap. It's the same as the vegan trap. If you think something is good and you got results, more of it must be better. It's just basic human thinking. The problem with fasting is that when you fast too much,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
then bad things start to happen but you're convinced that fasting works for you so then you fast even more and you end up making yourself sick women hit the fasting trap before men do usually in about six weeks of over of over fasting men it's usually closer to eight or even 12 weeks here's what it looks like for women when you over fast you get that fasting trap and over fasting means just fasting for too long too many days in a row
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But at the time it was literally checks in the mail, t-shirts sent back, trying to make ends meet and also scooping ice cream at Baskin Robbins. I was just being scrappy. It seemed obvious to me. And this is why young entrepreneurs totally kick ass because you don't even know how cool what you're doing is until you look back on it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Number one, you wake up and you feel like you didn't sleep. Your sleep quality goes down. Number two, your hormones start not working right. Your cycle is less regular. You have more symptoms. I don't normally get that. And then number three is hair thinning. And with guys, it hits us a couple of weeks later if we're over fasting. Number one, we don't sleep as well.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
If you're monitoring your sleep, you see changes or you just wake up and feel just not well rested today. Maybe I'll just have more coffee and fast extra today. Not a good idea. Second thing, guys, experience is you wake up without a kickstand. And the third thing is you're looking at me like you don't know what I'm talking about, but you know what I'm talking about.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then the third one, see, I didn't trigger any warnings there. The third one for guys is also hair thinning. So this is why for women, it's different. And women are more susceptible to over fasting. And it isn't true for all women. This is why fast this way. You must fast based on your current biological state, your current readiness.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So there are also changes that occur at different times of the month where you are in your cycle. Right. So for some women, when you're menstruating, like, OK, I really do great fasting. Other women, I need to eat because my blood sugar is unstable. But you've got to figure out what it is so that you feel good and you're not overdoing it. And I talk about the techniques in the book for that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
My secret to profiting in life is don't worry about profiting in life. That's not what you're here to do. You should evolve in life and profit is a side effect.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Go to Dave Asprey dot com. There's 3000 articles, 1000 hours of video. There's a vibrant learning community called the Upgrade Collective. And there are free challenges where I just teach you all my books for free because I just want you to have the knowledge. Because, well, if you have that knowledge, then you won't suffer the way I did. And everybody wins.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It was fun.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Cause you don't have the life experience to go, Oh my God, it's totally transformative. By the time you can tell it's transformative, you're probably too late.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Well, they always like to say, follow your passion and it's kind of true, but here's the thing. My passion really was, I want to change the world to make it better. And coffee is a way to do that. Your day is measurably better if you have coffee in the morning, if you're like 90% of people. So if you're the other 10%, I'm sorry, you have bad genetics and you shouldn't reproduce. Okay.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Just kidding. Okay. But there are 10% of people who don't tolerate coffee. But okay, that's one way. Eating quality food makes the world a better place. But at the time, having a digital nervous system for the planet so we could have the conversation we're having right now, I worked on the network engineering and protocols
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When Google was two guys and two computers, the company that I helped to co-found a part of this company that held their servers and designed architecture for many of the biggest brands out there when it was the Facebook, that mattered because we were building a way for all of us to connect so that you and I could have this conversation.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Because if you go back 25 years, there was no way for us to know about each other. much less to meet each other and have a conversation. So the world has become much better because of that. And in the last two years, now that we've turned on government censorship, it's become actually maybe worse because of it. So we've got to fix that. But that's a short-term blip.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Well, I'm going to make a bunch of people mad now, too. I got tired of studying computer science because here I was, I had a web page. I had started a business online and all of computer science was how do you do esoteric math on large computers? Like this isn't how this doesn't match my view of where the world's going.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I dropped out and I got a degree instead in something called information systems, which is how do you solve problems? And my concentration was in a form of artificial intelligence. There, how do I make a business work better? How do I solve a problem using computers instead of how do I do science stuff in a lab somewhere?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And a lot of computer science still to this day is very esoteric and theory based versus let's go out there and change something. And as an entrepreneur minded person. It hurts to not make things better. And so that was why I went out. But then I got to Silicon Valley. And by the time I was 26, I did make six million bucks. I lost it when I was 28. It's an important part of the journey.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
This is about having a good mentorship, good advice and being willing to take it. But that whole path, I said, OK, I'm going to lose the weight. I'll just work out hour and a half a day, six days a week, go on a low fat, low calorie diet. I will use my willpower. And after 18 months of that, what I found was I could max out all but two of the machines at the gym. I still had a 46 inch waist.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I still weighed 300 pounds and no, I was tired. So it didn't work. And it was sitting down. at Carl's Jr. with some friends. And I thought to myself, wait a minute, I'm having the chicken salad with no dressing and no chicken, right? Because I'm the lowest calorie, low fat thing. My friends are eating double Western bacon cheeseburgers.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I work out more than all my friends combined and I'm the fat one. And I thought, it isn't that I'm doing something wrong. I used to think it was a moral failing. It was a weakness. It was that I needed to eat less lettuce. No. What I was doing wasn't working. And I just said, wait a minute. I just studied how to manage a complex system where you don't know what's going on.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Because that's what the internet is. I teach classes at the University of California on how to do this. And I can't do it to myself. My doctor, when I went in, said something's not right. So maybe you should try to lose weight. Like, no, really? You think so? Tell me how. Eat healthy. And I just fired the doctor.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I literally said, you're fired when he didn't know some very basic info about nutrition. And I went off and said, I'm going to do it myself. And so every night after I'd finish the building cloud computing phase of my career, I would go home and I would study biology because I didn't want to die. And I was tired of feeling like crap. So it was enlightened self-interest.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I started learning from people three times my age who ran an anti-aging nonprofit group who had more energy than I did. And I hacked it. And then I said, OK, fine. I'm a VP at a publicly traded computer security company in charge of cloud security. So I have some credibility in that space. I started blogging.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I said, you know, five people are gonna read my blog, but it's going to prevent them from spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on recovering their health. And I'm performing better than I ever have, better than I ever thought was possible, even when I was younger. And so five people avoid my pain, avoid all the money that I spent. I have done a solid for the world and I'm okay with that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I wasn't starting a company. I was sharing hard earned knowledge through suffering. And it turns out more than five people liked what I had to say. And pretty soon I said, I want to make coffee that doesn't make me crash. So I said, this will be my first product. The market size for functional coffee was zero. It's a multiple hundred million dollar product.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I said, I want a protein powder that works. I'm going to do the research and the work around collagen. Today, collagen is a billion dollar category. It was not. And I said, hmm, MCT oil from the anti-aging world. It's an unknown thing. It's now a billion dollar category.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So what I started as a blog to help people not go through what I went through with all the brain fog and obesity and arthritis and just acting like a jerk because you don't have enough energy to be nice. Well, I wrote it not for heavy people. I wrote it for entrepreneurs. I wrote it for tech people because we are the ones who put the most mental energy in. I don't care if I have dad bod.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I'm married. I have kids. I care about building companies. I care about leading teams. I care about innovating and creating. And that requires energy. And it turns out I grew abs as a side effect, not as the goal. You can build abs and feel like crap. Or you can build energy and abs grow. And I wanted to teach that to my people, which were the geeks. Pretty soon. Go ahead.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Pretty soon, though, it wasn't just entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. It was Wall Street where it took off next. Let's see. These people are working 16, 18 hour days. They never get a break. They need their brains to work all the time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
My seed capital for what became Bulletproof was actually an investment bank hiring me to fly around the world to meet with hedge fund managers to teach them how to be smarter.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I did this so they could walk into the room with me. So their salespeople would come in because the hedge fund managers wouldn't take a meeting with a banker, but they would take a meeting with a brain hacker and a banker walking in with them. So I was the booth babe, for lack of a better word for hedge fund managers.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I took the money from that and I used it to buy my first round of coffee and to hire the first members of my team. So that's how it got started. And I started until I could replace my salary from a publicly traded company. I worked as a VP and I grew Bulletproof.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's cool that you mentioned that. When I was young, it was like, look, I'll do anything for money because money is going to make me happy. And I really believe that. And it motivated a lot of my decisions. What taught me the two biggest lessons in my career, it was like money and fame are what people want. We're told that that will make us happy since we're young. Okay.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So here I am, I'm 22, 23, whatever. I'm in entrepreneur magazine, like full color photo. Right. And I got some phone calls and some emails from people. And then two weeks later, okay, that was cool, but it didn't make me happy. And I was like, what the heck? I'm famous. I should be happy. I was happy for 10 minutes. Right. And. Then I said, OK, a little while our money. So I made a ton of money.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Six million dollars in 19 late 1990s dollars is 18 million dollars in today dollars because of inflation driven by the government. So it should be enough. Right. I looked at a friend who all of us at this company. I mean, this was let's see. Our market cap hit $36 billion. We split three times in one year on NASDAQ.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
This is one of the most phenomenal companies that helped to build the first wave of internet companies. It's called Exodus Communications for people who were around back then. And I looked at a friend and I said, I'll be happy when I have $10 million because $6 million wasn't enough. And if you are motivated by money, you will probably act like a jerk and you will never be happy.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And you will have what the Buddhists call hungry ghost syndrome. And in the hungry ghost realm of hell, it's one of the many levels of hell Buddhists talk about. This is where no matter what you eat, you're constantly hungry and you walk around with a distended belly and you can never be satisfied. Yeah. So if when I finally figured out I'm going to start this thing as a it's just a blog.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
First off, for all of my entrepreneur friends listening, do not market laziness. I didn't sell as many of that book as I expected because I thought this was a really cool thing. And it's recognize your body is lazy by design. All of mother nature is lazy. And the flip side of laziness is efficiency. So we don't want to waste one electron. We don't want to waste effort.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And if you think about it, you want to sell 10,000, whatever you sell, do you want to sell them with the most work or the least work? You want to do it with the least work. So entrepreneurs are the laziest people on the planet, right? And you could be even pissed off that I said that, but think about it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
You only do what works and you know that if you can do it more effectively, more efficiently, you'll get better results. So what this means though, is we get a lot of guilt and shame because you wake up and you say, well, I should want to go to the gym because I know it's good for me. But your body is screaming at you. Don't you know that that takes energy? And wasting energy is a bad thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And look, there's a couch and there's a croissant. So doesn't that look more comfortable? And it does. And so you feel this emotional, this attraction to things that are bad for you because your body is trying to get more energy in and waste less energy.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So instead of saying, well, I'm a bad person because my body wants to do what two billion years of evolution taught it to do, there is a way to use basically what the marketing industry does to make yourself motivated. And this is the hack for entrepreneurs. Recognize that your body loves to save more than makes sense.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And you see this on every single website, including mine when I'm selling danger coffee or whatever. 10% discount. Why does saving two bucks on a bag of coffee feel like you're saving more than $2? It's because your emotions, before you can think, know that saving is really good.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So instead of motivating yourself, I'm gonna go to the gym, I'm gonna sweat, I'm gonna work hard, I know it's good for me, that's all logic and the body doesn't do logic. Instead, you wake up and you say, today, I am going to do biohacking instead of going to the gym, even if it involves going to a gym or to an Upgrade Labs or something.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And the motivation is instead of wasting a lot of time, I'm going to do a more effective workout. So you just tell yourself, I am going to save 45 minutes of suffering by going to the gym right now. That flips the switch on your emotional body. So now all of a sudden, oh, yeah, I'm going to save because saving feels bigger than doing work. You can do this in your entrepreneurial life as well.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I have this long hour meeting. This is going to suck. Well, what if you reposition that mentally and say, I'm going to save eight hours of work later. So in your mind, you're saying, wow, I'm saving seven hours of effort. And that meeting will not feel painful.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I have the average response time in my brain of an 18 year old.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Understand, savings motivates you because your biology is lazy, even though you have an immense drive and power, otherwise you wouldn't be an entrepreneur. So I don't want to waste my willpower. I can use my willpower to overcome my desire to not go to the gym, or I could change my desire so that I want to go to the gym so I can save my willpower for building my business.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I'm happy to be here.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
This is one of my favorite parts of biohacking. What really happens, and this is totally invisible, is that say I clap my hands. And you know that it took some time for the sound to get to your ears and then you heard it. But that's a total lie. Because if we glued electrodes on your head, like we do at my neuroscience company,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Well, your auditory cortex, the part of your brain that hears things, a third of a second after the sound got to your body, your body allowed your brain to hear it. And during that third of a second, the body decides what you're allowed to hear and what you're going to feel about it. And then you're going to make up a story that matches the feeling. This is how all of reality works.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
There's a one third of a second window where your body gets to betray you. And understanding that is pretty profound. Now you go, oh. My body's pre-processing reality for me. How is it doing that? What are the rules it's using? Well, it's using rules that it learned starting from the moment of conception to try and figure out how to survive in this world.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So your body's creating a user interface to help you survive. Unfortunately, it got programmed by that time someone almost dropped you when you were one year old, by that coach who was mean to you, by the bullies, by parenting, even the best parents make mistakes. So all of us, especially when we're younger, we have triggers. There's things that just piss you off. They get under your skin.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
That is ancient survival systems that are making you feel a certain way to try and keep you alive. And understanding that's not you. It's not that you got anxious. It's that your body got anxious and then you chose how to react about it. But if you don't know that, you're going to feel that you're the same thing as your body. And then this is the worst for entrepreneurs.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Let's say you're cruising along, business is doing okay, and then something happens. Potential lawsuit from some douchebag employee who's making up a story because you fired him because they stole money. I've had that happen, by the way. So stuff like that. Okay, now the lawsuit or the bad PR, whatever, it feels like a threat to your body. And now you're in a state of fight or flight.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Your decision-making goes down, your team leadership goes down, and you're dysregulated. It happens all the time. Understand this was your body's response. It was not you. And by creating that division, now you can say, all right, I can tell my body's freaking out. Let me do some deep breaths. Let me do a cold plunge. Let me do whatever the biohack is to turn off the bodily response.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
In the meantime, though, I am not going to be triggered. I am not going to be reactive. And if you can stop being reactive when there's a perceived threat to your company, you'll see that a perceived threat isn't even real. You want to hear a story about that?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Years ago, about 2015 or so, Bulletproof is taking off. And to be clear, guys, Danger Coffee is my new coffee company. I have nothing to do with Bulletproof anymore. But years ago, Bulletproof is taking off. And I get on this guy Joe Rogan's show. And I didn't even know who he was because I don't actually listen to podcasts. I have 500 million downloads of my own. I make them.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I don't listen to them. So I go on and I changed Joe Rogan's life. I helped him with ADHD. We talked about kale, all kinds of good stuff. And he is prolific in his praise, multiple, multiple offsets. But then he has ownership in a company that decides to copy Bulletproof. So overnight he sends 25,000 organized trolls to my website to just decimate it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And he starts basically saying all sorts of bad things about me online.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Oh, it was, it was super dirty. It was financially motivated. And he actually deleted the three episodes where I've been on when he went over to Spotify. But the point of all this is that that freaked me out. I was already doing very well, hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, and he caused a bump in sales, but it wasn't like life-changing, but it was cool. So it just felt weird.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And then all of a sudden that did trigger me. Like, what is going on? So I, for about six months, I was really dysregulated. My social media, instead of people saying, Dave, I lost a bunch of weight. My brain works like, thank you. You saved my life. My family's different. All this amazing stuff. It was just, you know, you're a con artist and a snake oil salesman.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And it was all from one guy trying to ruin my reputation. Well, that did push my threat response buttons. And so I was reactive to it. When I sat down and I did the stuff that I write about now, it's called the reset mode. My next book is about that. And went in and dealt with the trigger itself. Here was the reality. It felt like I was being tortured or that I was going to die or whatever.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Like it felt really threatening to my work in the world. Every time Joe Rogan says Dave Asprey is a bad man, I sell more coffee. That's the reality, but I couldn't see it. My body wouldn't let me see it until I dealt with an old trauma that was part of it. Every entrepreneur in existence has old traumas that we're unaware of that flavor how we see reality.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And if you find yourself being reactive, that's powerful, but you're unlikely to know you're being reactive. And this is why you have a team who trusts you. They're gonna tell you when you're being reactive. In my case, my buddy, Zach, who was a convoy commander in Iraq, driving generals past explosive stuff, just called me on my bullshit.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And you need a team who can call you on your bullshit when you're being emotional, you're being reactive. And if it happens, it's either an old trauma Or maybe you drank too much last night and your biology is out. And this is another thing entrepreneurs just need to understand.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If you're feeling dysregulated, your brain is foggy, you're reactive, you're cranky, whatever it is, it's either your biology is stressed or you're emotionally stressed. It's one of the two. It's always one of those. Deal with the biology first because it's easy and then the emotions feel less strong and then deal with the emotions.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If you do that, you're captain of your own ship and it changes everything.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Well, stress is not good or bad. Stress is what causes you to become stronger. So if you're a typical entrepreneur like me, well, if stress is what makes you stronger, let me do even more stress. In fact, I'll lift weights twice a day. Well, lifting weights is stress, right? And you can build incredible resilience with biohacking. You also need to recover. So I don't recommend you avoid stress.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I recommend you avoid useless stress. Things that only take out of your energy bucket instead of putting things in. And recognize where are you on the scale from 1 to 10. If you just flew back from Dubai and maybe you drank too much, maybe you didn't sleep, is it time to go to the gym lift heavy? and go out partying again? It's not.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So recognizing 80% of the improvement that you get cognitively or physically comes from recovering after stress. It does not come from the stress. Entrepreneurs are wired to focus on stress and to go into stressful situations because we can handle it. We're not wired to recover. When entrepreneurs come in to upgrade labs, we're measuring all this stuff. And they're saying, I want to put on muscle.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I'm like, you're not ready. Your body is not recovered. So if you want to grow, you want to improve, you recover first, then you stimulate, then you recover. 80% of the improvement comes from recovering. So don't be afraid of stress. Choose useful stress. And stress is different than anxiety. Anxiety is this feeling of doom.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
You feel it across your chest, in your gut, in your heart, and something is causing that. And it's either repetitive thoughts in the head. And for that, I use neurofeedback at 40 Years of Zen, and I teach a lot of techniques in my books. Or most likely, something is wrong inside your body. It doesn't have a micronutrient. It doesn't have a mineral it needs.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And the biggest needle mover is the simplest. If you were to take Vitamin Dake, it's just vitamindake.com. These are fat-soluble vitamins. And you take those along with Minerals 101 broad-spectrum minerals. The fat soluble vitamins drive the minerals into your tissues in the right place.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So now, if you have stress in your business, stress in your personal life, or you just go to the gym and you're lifting, Now the body says, okay, there was stress. Now I want to recover. Do I have enough zinc? Oh, I do. Now I can make testosterone. Now I can make muscle. Oh, I don't have enough zinc. I'm going to feel anxiety.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So at least half your anxiety and sometimes 80, 90% of it, it's just biology. It's not the thoughts in your head. You just think it's the thoughts in your head.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
In fact, it's the number one contributor the way I used to. You can have emotional stress. You can have relationship problems. Those are very real. It's just, they're impacting you so much because your biology is wrecked, because it's tweaked, because you have all kinds of problems. What I see now in entrepreneurs, both men and women, is that your testosterone is too low.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I am sticking to at least 180. And it's funny, there are a group of people in the longevity field who are kind of afraid of death. And it's like, I'm never going to die. And look, the universe is going to end at some point. I'm willing to wait around until that. And I don't think 180 is an upper limit. I just think it's 50% better than our current best. And this week, I celebrated my 29% birthday.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
It's because we have estrogen everywhere. You're using air fresheners and perfume and scented products and there's plastic and everything. When testosterone is low, it doesn't matter if men or women, women have more testosterone than estrogen, believe it or not, naturally. And since everyone is low right now, testosterone controls dopamine.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that causes you to be motivated by pursuing a goal. So a low testosterone man or woman who's an entrepreneur is not going to pursue their goals as much as they could. How do you fix it? Eat less bad oils, less synthetic fragrances and things like that, less plastic clothing, less plastic bottles. And then you eat more saturated fats.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So you can actually make testosterone and get a lab test. If I'd have had access to lab tests during the first part of my career, when I was 26, I made $6 million at the first company that did data centers. When Google was two guys and two computers, we built the buildings that held their servers. My testosterone was lower than my mom's. And I found this out back then. It was very hard to do.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
90% of people listening to this episode are low in their sex hormones right now. So you might as well test it. And testing it, you go to the doctor and doctor says, you don't need it. You're too young. I'm like, I'm done with that. You can go to axo.health, A-X-O dot health. And someone will come to your house and draw blood and advanced longevity panels like 600 bucks.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And then you get a dashboard. Where are my sex hormones? And let's say maybe you're 26, 27, like I was at that time when I made all that money. You can say, I don't need to. If you're feeling great, know your numbers. Because when you are 47 instead of 27, you can keep your testosterone and estrogen and other hormones right where you feel best.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And if you're 300 pounds, like I was in my early 20s, you're already wrecked, but at least recognize what is wrong. And you don't have to go to a doctor to do this anymore. You have a right to your own data.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If you know your ROAS, if you know the amount of traffic going to your website, how many downloads for your podcast, how dare you not know your thyroid, which controls energy, your testosterone, which controls motivation, and your inflammation, which is a sign that your efforts, the electricity your body makes is not going into something useful, it's going into inflammation.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If you have those variables, you manage them the same way you manage anything else in your business. And it costs less than you're probably spending on AdWords every day.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I had the founders of Prenuvo, which is one of the whole body scans on my podcast about three, four years ago. And they reached out a couple months later and said, Dave, that podcast episode saved 25 lives.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
People after they got their whole body scan, perfectly healthy looking people. They called them, said straight to the hospital, you're about to blow an aneurysm. And another dozen people had life-threatening things that needed treatment, things like stage three cancer that you have no symptoms of, but they can see it. So you go and you spend an hour doing that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Given that cancer, it's incredibly increased, especially in young people, for some reason over the last five years. Who could ever talk about what that was? But it's actually a big problem in young people. I do a whole body scan every year and it runs about 2,500 bucks. And it'll tell you if anything's wrong.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And some critics will say, you might find something that's wrong that wasn't actually wrong. Well, that's why you do it every year. So you see what changes. I have two spots in my brain that are congenital. They don't cause any symptoms, but if they got bigger, I'd go work on it. It's like basic maintenance.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Most people listening, if you're an entrepreneur, you're doing ideally hundreds of thousands to maybe a hundred million plus in your business. You can afford a few grand to make sure that your biology is keeping track with your business. It's required. In fact, it's silly to run a business and not manage your biology. It's just not that hard anymore. It used to be really difficult.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
You can get the actual health test. You can order the supplements. It's just not much work. And you don't have to eat perfectly. You might find this food really affects your sleep if you have a ring that tracks your sleep or something. But it just isn't that hard.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So I just look at my birthdays now as a percentage of my minimum acceptable duty life. And I think that has an effect on the cells themselves. There are interesting studies where they'll take really old people and they'll make a special like a hotel with all the TV shows and all the furniture from when they were young. And then their biological markers of aging go down.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
The one thing that I wish someone had taught me when I was learning entrepreneurship in my 20s, your company is a direct reflection of your energy. So if you're feeling physical anxiety because your body is not getting the nutrients it needs or you're feeling emotional anxiety, your team will be dysregulated.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So if you're powerful and shiny and bright and dialed in and clean, your company will be the same thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
It's silly to run a business and not manage your biology. Your body is lazy by design, and the flip side of laziness is efficiency. You're just wasting time in the gym. Being fit is important, but it does not follow that spending more time in the gym makes you more fit. If you can learn to recover faster than mother nature intended, you can do way more in your life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Show me an entrepreneur without ADHD. It's exceptionally rare. Like we are attracted to entrepreneurship because we have ADHD. And certainly I meet those diagnostic criteria. At least I used to. I might not anymore.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Well, if you're a muggle, your boss can tell you to pay attention to something and you will just do it. And that seems horrible. Because the ability to control your attention, so you put all of your attention onto something you care about and you ignore things that don't matter. That's the kind of world I want to live in.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I don't want to be someone, oh, look, pay attention to this stupid thing that doesn't move the needle for the world forward. No, you cannot make me do that. So the superpower is that. But what it does mean is you need to put systems in place to help you manage that. Because there will be things, if you have ADHD, that just take a huge amount of energy for you to do it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And they're different for different people. So identify the top 10 things that suck your energy the most. It might be paying bills. It might be taking out the trash, whatever it is. And just make a sacred commitment to yourself that you are never going to do those again in your life because they're not worth it. And hire someone to do it. And I also have to tell you this.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If you do your own laundry and you're an entrepreneur, you're doing it wrong unless you have a laundry fetish. If you love your laundry, go for it. The rest of the time, that is the lowest value thing you could ever do with your time. So be absolutely savage about hiring people to do the stuff you hate. You do that first. So I need a head of marketing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
No, you need someone to wash your socks and do the other things that you hate because you will be so much more free that then you will hire the right person to be in charge of marketing. Right. So you got to get rid of that stuff, especially if you have ADHD. It's critically important for you to just get everything done you want to get done.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So I just keep reminding myself, like, I'm somewhere in my mid-30s or less, and that's how I see the world. And I was only kidding when I said you were ageist. But the idea here is there are people out there who have the attitude, they have the brains of being 32 years old, and they might be substantially older than that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And I learned most of biohacking from people in their 70s and 80s when I was 26 years old. So I want to find the people who have lots of calendar years who have young energy and like, what are you doing? Because that's where we learn.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
There is an incredibly elegant system in your body that gets all sorts of stuff done so you don't have to pay attention. If you had to think about each heartbeat, you had to think about each breath and squeeze all the little things that need squeezing and pumping, your brain would be overwhelmed. In fact, you would just die. So there's an operating system in there.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And that operating system is what's taking care of business in that third of a second before your conscious brain sees or hears anything. And it's the thing that's responsible for rapid threat detection. It's not very smart, but it's very, very fast. And you've felt this. If you ever lean against a hot stove and then you go, oh, that's pretty hot. I guess I should move my hand away.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And that's not how it works. You pull your hand away before you get burned and say, good thing I was so fast I pulled my hand away. It wasn't you. It was your operating system. Another name for the operating system is your ego. It's all the stuff that happens before you can think. And we all learn, including me, to feel shame and guilt about this part of us because we think it's us.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
No, it's a very fast, very ancient part of your operating system that's reacting to potential threats because it doesn't understand a threat is not a tiger. That's all it's wired for is don't die right now.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So embracing this idea that you have an operating system, that it does things without your knowledge or permission, and that you can influence your operating system by reprogramming it with things like meditation or breath work or 40 years of Zen, my neuroscience program is my preferred way.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Or that you can influence the operating system by making it feel more nourished and more safe, by feeding yourself the right way, by having darkness at night and sunlight during the day, and just make the body feel like it has more capacity, and then you're harder to trigger, and then you stay more focused on whatever it is you care about.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
One of the things that entrepreneurs do is we have this belief. If something is good, more of it's better. And if something is bad, you shouldn't have any of it. A good example there would be cortisol. It's the death hormone. Low cortisol is four times more deadly than high cortisol. So there's a proper dose and proper timing for everything. And we do the same thing in the gym.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
When I was a 23-year-old, 300-pound guy, I went to the gym 90 minutes a day, six days a week without fail for 18 months. You'd think I would have been ripped. No, I still weighed 300 pounds and I had a 46 inch waist when I started and when I finished. And it really pissed me off. So what was the problem? Well, if exercise is better, more exercise must be better to get results.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And we oftentimes do this in our businesses too. If this thing works, I need to do more of it. But there's a right amount of ad spend because spending more when ROAS goes down is a bad idea. So... What you want to be able to do is just allocate your resources effectively to doing the right amount of stuff.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
The power of self-deception works on cells. We call it placebo, but it's totally real. In fact, a lot of pharmaceuticals get approved that are 10% better than just what your mind can do on its own. We've all read Think and Grow Rich. I read that when I was 16, and I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. And we know that having a positive mindset, visualization matters.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And what we've learned about biology and the principle of smarter, not harder, is that the body doesn't change based on the amount of work you do. It changes based on how quickly you do the work and how quickly you recover. And using this, if you come to Upgrade Labs, we have an AI bike. And you can do this for 15 minutes a week. So three, five minute sessions.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And during that time, you never sweat. It's barely hard. It is 94% more efficient than going to a spin class. So in 15 minutes, the amount of time you spend brushing your teeth, you can have the same cardiovascular benefits. Actually, it's not the same, I lied. You can have six times more cardiovascular benefits than you would get from doing an hour of spin class a day.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
The reason is wrap it on, wrap it off. So think about this. Recovery is what causes you to improve, not pushing harder. And I look at what I've done to my body, to my mind when I was younger, because I believe that pushing harder got results. No, it's pushing hard for a short period of time and then recovering.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
That causes positive change in your brain, in your muscles, all throughout your biology. And the liberating part of this, it takes way less time to do that. So now you have time for your relationships and your business instead of just giving everything and just pushing, pushing, pushing. It's spikes of pushing followed by recovery, spikes of pushing followed by recovery.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And it follows, if you can learn to recover faster than mother nature intended, you can do way more in your life. And that's what biohacking really is about.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
What you would do is you would lift heavy and you would exhaust the muscles as fast as you can. And you would keep your workout to 15 minutes. And depending on what your goals are, you're going to go for the largest muscles first. So you want quads, you want your butt, you want your chest, you want your back.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If you just did those and you did it in 15 minutes, as hard as you can, and afterwards you laid on your back and took some deep breaths. And you are done. Instead of going and doing a lot more machines or say, well, more is better. Let me get on the treadmill. It turns out you'll get much better results. And you can do things that stack the deck in your favor.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
You make sure you've got your vitamin D, kingdom minerals 101, so that you have the precursors, the building blocks. And then you make sure of animal protein right after you work out. So now the body says, oh, I'm nourished and I'm safe. You might even finish and do some breath work. Just bring your heart rate down. Relax.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And the body says, oh, there was a brief stressor, must have been a tiger, but now I'm nourished and I'm safe. And when the body has experienced stress and it is nourished and it is safe, it will change rapidly and dramatically. But what I used to do and what most people do is they go into the gym for 45 minutes and if they really overtrain and then, okay, I'm done, they go back to work.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
But it's the nutrient status and the heart rate that really change things. So it's relaxing after you exercise. This means you go to the gym, you lift heavy twice a week. And look, if you're a fitness competitor and you want to get the best tricep, you're going to work that thing out. But I'll tell you, my exercise regimen, 20 minutes a week at Upgrade Labs using AI-powered tech.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
My muscles are AI. My cardio is all AI. I'm 4.8% body fat. The calendar thinks I'm 52. My lab tests think I'm 35. And I'm reasonably ripped. That's caffeine, by the way. All right. So you can do the same thing. If you got back, say you go to the gym four to six hours a week, if you got that back and you were in better shape than with what you're doing now, what would you do with four to six hours?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So why would it only matter in your business? It doesn't even make sense.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Spend it with your girlfriend or your boyfriend. Spend it on a new project at work, spend it learning how to meditate or play pickleball, whatever. You're just wasting time in the gym. So being fit is important, but it does not follow that spending more time in the gym makes you more fit. That is a myth.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
It is learning how to stimulate and recover in the briefest period of time frees you so that you have the body and the mind you want and you can do stuff that matters.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Well, if going to the gym is something you really, really love, you can do it as long as you're not overtraining. I don't know very many people who exercise for an hour a day who are not overtrained. So what if you went to a yoga class instead of whatever kind of thing you're doing now? What if you went for a walk in the forest? What if you went to a meditation class?
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Would you actually have a better body and a better mind? It's entirely possible.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
A lot of people, especially high stress entrepreneurs, they'll go to the gym to burn off excess adrenaline and cortisol. In fact, special forces people, after an operation, they will go to the gym and just kill it for an hour just to dump all their stress hormones.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If you're using exercise to deal with the stress, maybe you should find out where the stress is coming from and do something about that. Or you might be doing it because you're addicted to endorphins. And I know people like, if I don't go for a run every day, I'm just, I'm not happy. You know what happens to those guys as they age?
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
They get new knees and new hips because going for a five mile run every day is not good for your body over time. And if you can't deal with reality, unless you basically go out and exercise with high intensity every single day, something's probably not right. And I respect the desire to be stronger and faster, and I share it.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
What I'm proposing is you want to be able to do that and be in a place of peace and power, and it shouldn't take an hour a day. And if you just love running, do it as long as you can, but it does come at a cost.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Well, grass-fed red meat is the healthiest meat that most people can eat. And there's three reasons that people become vegan and none of them are valid scientifically. One of them is saying, I don't want there to be suffering in animals. Okay. Number one,
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If you're eating a soy burger or one of those impossible things, there are large threshers and tractors that go through the field and they cut up every animal. So there's dead baby deer, turtles, salamanders, mice, butterflies, snakes, all the things.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If they're even still alive on that land, because unless you're eating organic stuff, the land has been sterilized by glyphosate and things like that. So the deaths per calorie is from a vegan thing are much, much higher than if you eat a pound of grass fed meat every day. Because that cow, it was just one life for you to eat for an entire year.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And that means you can buy it from a small farmer who treated the cow with respect. I built and ran a regenerative farm for 10 years on Vancouver Island. I've raised my own animals and eaten them for a long time. So there is not an ethical argument around killing. You're killing more animals with your fake food. The health argument, vegans get sick all the time.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
These plant things suck minerals out of your bones. The more vegan you are, the more you need more minerals in your diet. So that doesn't work very well. And you don't have the right fat and your testosterone is low and you feel ungrounded. And there's a reason that people make jokes about vegans being highly emotionally reactive.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I say this as a former raw vegan, you're ungrounded because you don't have any minerals in your body. So those don't work. So it's not health. It's not animals. And then this ridiculous environmental argument. Grass-fed animals build soil. Soil is the largest carbon sink on the planet. I put the first $50,000 into the Carbon Capture XPRIZE that Elon Musk funded for $100 million.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And we can pull carbon out of the air. We're not going to do it with industrial farming for plant-based things. We're going to do it by restoring our soil, which requires animals. So why should you eat meat? It is the right kind of fat, the right kind of protein, and it's mineral rich, and it's actually good for the environment. We just need to fix our animal agriculture.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And if you look at chickens, the kind of heritage chickens that I raise take nine months to reach full size. The kind that you're eating takes six weeks to reach full size, and they have no minerals in them. They have very little nutrients, and they torture those animals. And you can eat one chicken a day. So you want to kill 365 animals a year? You don't want to kill one animal a year.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And from a spiritual shamanic perspective, at 40 Years of Zen, we do a lot of spiritual stuff. I've done shamanic training. I've met with meditation gurus and learned from them all over the world. The reality is that from a spiritual perspective, I believe animals or farm animals come here to experience gratitude. And this is why all societies practice saying grace or saying something grateful.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
We're getting to that point. And it's funny, when I was 24 and I was building out my tech entrepreneur career, I went to the hairdresser. I'm like, can you give me some gray right here on the sides? And they're like, why would you ever want that? We don't have gray hair dye.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So when I'm going to eat that beautiful grass-fed ribeye that I'm going to eat after this show, I'm going to take about 10 seconds, say, hey, thanks cow. And then it's complete. So if you want to feel better, I'm not even kidding. Add a pound of steak a day for a week and watch how your life changes. Eating that much red meat
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Eating one gram of animal protein per pound of body weight has the same effect on your biology as taking semaglutide or one of the GLP-1 drugs. That costs $1,000 a month to do that stuff. And I have used GLP one time for a podcast. I've never used it. And how many people walk around at 4.8% body fat, especially with a history of obesity? It's unheard of. And I'm not using pharmaceuticals to do it.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I'm using beef.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Well, the people who say meat stay around in your stomach all the time, I've seen that stuff as well. It's nonsense. And all you have to do is go to any doctor who does colonoscopies. They look with a camera inside your colon, and there is no meat in your colon. The sides are pink. It's just not there. Now, what does stick around your colon and rot is plants.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
It turns out the lowest residue food you can eat is meat. You eat meat, almost all of it's digested, and there's very little left over. And contrast that with a bowl of kale or whole grains, neither of which I eat. what you're going to find is tons of undigestible matter that is rotting in the gut. Ideally, it's fermenting and making good stuff, but that oftentimes doesn't happen.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And there is no evidence that meat sticks around your gut. That's just a wives' tale because it does get fully digested. Also, if you're eating too much meat and your body doesn't make enough enzymes, you will have the worst farts ever, in which case you need to fix your digestion because meat absorbs completely.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And then cholesterol, even the American Heart Association, the worst job ever of doing their mission. Well, they say that cholesterol in food is a nutrient of non-concern. They've said eating cholesterol doesn't harm you at all. And these are the most skeptical people on the planet. And cholesterol is the precursor for all of your sex hormones, for your stress hormones.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Low cholesterol people, including what happens when you're vegan, they die more from all-cause mortality. The longest-lived humans have higher LDL and higher HDL. And when you eat the way I've been teaching entrepreneurs and others to eat for 10-plus years now, you get enough saturated fat You get enough animal protein. Your resilience goes up and your inflammation goes down.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And I said, well, I know that I'm going to make $20,000 a year more when I go into a job because they're going to say, oh, he has experience. And so you want to look like you have enough experience for people to take you seriously, because if you look like you're 25 and you're 45, you're not going to be given the kind of respect you think.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Your HDL, which is the protective kind of cholesterol, goes up and your LDL largely doesn't matter in that thing. And I teach people with the Axo Health app here are the markers to pay attention to. If you're worried about, oh no, I ate some butter, I might die. Well, number one, that's what we've been eating throughout all of history and people didn't get heart attacks until recently.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
But let's say you're still, just test the markers that tell you whether there's damage to the lining of your arteries. It's pretty easy to do.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Oh, my God.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
All right. If you were to walk outside into your backyard or into the forest, pick a plant, just a random one, and chew it up and swallow it, you know what's going to happen? You're probably going to the hospital or maybe just to the bathroom. Most plants are so toxic you can't eat them. Right. And so there's well, those aren't the edible plants. OK, just because something is edible.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Do you think all edible plants are 100 percent edible or does each plant come with pros and cons? We know that that's the case. So can you survive on a plant to get energy, even though it's also delivering toxins? Of course you can. That's one of the things that's made our species so powerful, because during famines we can eat all sorts of stuff. It just comes at a cost.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
In my first big biohacking book, in the first chapter, I wrote about these five big toxins that are affecting your performance that come from plants. And lectins cause inflammation differently for different people. These are plant defense compounds. And the most famous lectin is called sarin nerve gas. And this is something that terrorists have used for creating chaos. And it comes from beans.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So lectins can be really good or really bad for you. You just don't know, depending on your genetics. So minimizing lectins for a brief period, if suddenly your joints don't hurt anymore, that's a big sign. The one that people oftentimes miss is called phytic acid. This is present in whole grains and legumes.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And phytic acid steals minerals, including calcium and zinc and a lot of the other ones, from your bones and from your mitochondria. It's such a problem that when farmers feed chickens or cows grain, they have to measure the phytic acid level because the cows or chickens will have such soft bones they can't stand. So then they give them special enzymes to block this.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And those animals can digest phytic acid and humans can't. And then there's oxalate, which is a huge issue. And these are all in the first chapter of the Bulletproof Diet. And oxalates... are compounds that cause razor sharp calcium crystals to form throughout your body. And we can handle about 200 milligrams a day.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
One spinach, kale, beet, almond smoothie can have five times the amount your body can handle. And when you're young, it doesn't cause damage. You might get some skin irritation or a little bit of soreness, but they stick around in the body over time. And 70% of kidney stones are caused by plants, not by eating animals.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And in entrepreneurship, it matters less, except if you're going in with a bunch of old, stodgy government bureaucrats and trying to sell them your new service. They want to see that you've got enough experience. So there's probably around 30 to 35 is where you want to be pinned in terms of how you look and how you think.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
When people lower oxalate in their diet by getting rid of the weird, freaky superfoods, eating less whole grains, eat white rice instead of whole grains if you want a grain, what happens? And they eat less spinach, less kale, even red raspberries. All of a sudden, their brains work better. They don't have cravings. Their joints don't hurt. Their skin clears up.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So there's, okay, could you eat those foods and survive? Yes. Is that going to be an improvement in your quality of life? No. So what I recommend people do is eat the low toxin plants and eat grass-fed meat. And for carbs, you eat the kinds of fruit that are lower in toxins. And you eat some rice, you eat some honey. And if you do that, you're going to be fine.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And maybe some sweet potatoes, maybe some white potatoes. Those both have toxins depending on whether you're sensitive or not. So I'm not asking for perfection. I'm just saying that if you make... A few changes to minimize, just to recognize that some plants are probably causing your digestive problems and your skin problems. Stop them for a little while and watch how life changes.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
The reason you do this as an entrepreneur is that if something's causing inflammation in your gut and you think it's good for you and it's not, and your gut's inflamed, your brain's inflamed. When your brain's inflamed, someone's going to do something stupid in your company and you're going to get pissed off at them. You're going to yell at them.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And then the whole day, the whole company is disrupted. So you have to manage your biology if you want to be the leader of your company.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
It's more about avoiding the most likely harmful foods than it is eating the good foods. The best thing is grass-fed meat. And you can get grass-fed hamburger. You can get grass-fed steak. It really matters that it's grass-fed for a whole bunch of complex reasons, including environmental and including your own health. But grass-fed meat, and then instead of spinach, have lettuce or arugula.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Those are good for you. Be careful with the nightshade family, which is potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant, bell peppers. There are so many people, 28% of rheumatoid arthritis is caused by those plants. So don't eat them for a week, and then eat them again and see what happened. You may be completely immune to them, or like many, many people, you go, oh, wait, when I don't eat those...
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
My brain is clearer, my skin is clearer, and my digestion is better. My joints don't hurt. And then in terms of carbohydrates, white rice. The reason white rice is so much better than brown rice is that brown rice contains way more arsenic and way more inflammatory compounds in the gut.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And this is why in every rice eating culture, people who can afford it eat white rice and only the poorest peasants eat brown rice. There's more calories in brown rice because you keep the lining of the rice, the outer shell, the husk, but that's bad for you. It's better than starving, but it's not a superfood.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Because by the time you're mid-30s, you figured out enough stuff to not do the things you would have done when you were 22 or 25. And I think that's where you maximize your value as a business partner. And it's fine if you're 50. In fact, you probably have more experience, but it's better if you have the experience of being 50. They think you're 35 and then you just outplay them.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And if a restaurant tries to charge more for brown rice, you should tell them to go screw themselves. Eat the white rice if you're going to eat carbs like that. Don't eat refined sugar. It's not good for you. If you find you need more carbs, honey and fruit. And don't eat a zero-carb diet all the time. It's bad for you. Don't eat carbs every day. It's bad for you.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And every now and then, skip breakfast or skip dinner. Do some intermittent fasting three days a week. Intermittent fasting starts at 12 hours a day of not eating. Have an earlier dinner, have a later breakfast, and you'll be fine.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Danger Coffee is a new idea. It's called Danger because who knows what you might do. It is the good kind of danger, the kind of danger that entrepreneurs are attracted to. To make it, it is lab tested mold free because the mold toxin that's found in coffee very commonly, especially in the U.S. In fact, recent studies just came out.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
It directly inhibits mitochondrial function, which means it takes your energy. So if you drink coffee and it needs sugar and then you feel tweaked a while later and you want more coffee, it's probably the toxins from mold in the coffee. So danger coffee is mold free. Brands I've worked with in the past no longer say mold-free on the label. They just say clean, whatever that means.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And what's biggest about Danger Coffee, there is a therapeutic dose of trace minerals and electrolytes in the coffee. It's a very high-end, amazing flavor coffee. But Danger Coffee has those minerals and those minerals help your body make electricity.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So if you're going to make a cup of coffee in the morning, it might as well give you a therapeutic dose of trace minerals that your body needs to make energy in your cells and you feel different. People say, oh my gosh, it doesn't need sugar. No, it's because it's really good coffee. It tastes great. But the minerals do something different in the body. You can add butter. You can add MCT.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
You can blend it up or not. It still creates a very different coffee experience.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
One thing you could do today to be more profitable tomorrow is find an older person over 70 and ask them for advice because they have suffered way more than you have and they will tell you for free what to do.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
The most important secret to profiting in life is It's to understand that you're not investing dollars, you're investing energy, and then you're investing time, and then you're investing suffering, and then you're investing dollars. So look at it as how much energy did I put in and how much energy did I get out of it? If that is the thing that you measure,
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
it'll directly lead to more joy and more happiness and the sense that you're resilient and you can handle everything. But if you only focus on dollars, every time you get more dollars, it won't make you happier.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
You can go to dangercoffee.com to check out the coffee. And all of my stuff is at daveasprey.com. And if you feel called to go deep with me on neuroscience over five days in Seattle with the world's top brain upgrade facility, 40yearsofzen.com.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Thanks, Hala.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And that's what biohacking really is about. Now I have the body I want without a lot of work because if you do that, you're captain of your own ship and it changes everything.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Wow. I do everything. So I wrote a major book on longevity called Superhuman that outlines all of this. And there's seven pillars of aging. And you'll get, well, what's the most unusual thing? Recently, I went down to Costa Rica and I reset my central aging clock.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And what that means is I sat every day for a couple hours with focused ultrasound beams hitting the hypothalamus in my brain while getting stem cells so they could actually cross the blood-brain barrier. And the effect on cognitive function is really powerful. If you've looked at aging lately, you've seen people say, we can reverse cell aging. OK, that's nice.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
But if your brain thinks you're old and your brain actually is aging and your cells are less old, OK, you've got some of the longevity. But having a young brain, having done a ton of neurofeedback on my brain to train it to be more effective, to be more powerful and to be more efficient at the same time, that combination is pretty incredible.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And I do all the other stuff you'd expect, like tons of stem cells. and making sure my cognitive systems work epically well. The cool thing is as you age, your brain slows down a little bit unless you do something about it, then we can measure that. So I have the average response time in my brain of an 18 year old. So whatever I'm doing is working.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Biohacking, the definition when I first came out with this, it's the art and science of changing the environment around you and then inside of you so you have control of your own biology. And the areas that we play in are longevity, which is a big focus for me, cognitive function, and then I'm going to call it the spiritual or the happiness side of things.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
What you would do is you would, and then you make sure of animal protein right after you work out.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And I've been putting a lot of weighting of my effort behind those three areas. And you'll see a lot of people who maybe are newer to the biohacking scene. They read a bunch of stuff and decide they want to write a book or start a podcast. And the reason I didn't trademark the word biohacking is I wanted it to be a global movement. I don't own biohacking. I just started it.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
People call me the father of biohacking. So I do see people who are saying I'm just a longevity person and there's a longevity conference. And then I'll see people say, well, I'm a biohacker. I just have some red light and some cold plunges. I'm like, those are very old biohacks. That's great. And all of these are helping people.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
What's maybe most refreshing is that biohacking has crushed the vegan diet. And having been a raw vegan at one time in my life, which is really bad for you, what inspires me the most is I write all of my posts, all my podcasts.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Grass-fed red meat is the healthiest meat that most people can eat.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
If someone had just told me this when I was 20, it would have saved me $2.5 million, and it would have saved me an enormous amount of suffering, both the spiritual, emotional suffering and physical suffering, having lost 100 pounds, having made my brain work better than it ever has. So I try to keep it balanced. It also comes down to what's your goal?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Because the things that make old people young are the things that make young people powerful. So let's say you're 30 and you say, oh my gosh, I'm going to do biohacking. Now I have the body I want without a lot of work. Because if you're an entrepreneur, you don't have time to spend 10 hours a day on longevity and going to the gym because you're actually building a company.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
You probably have some sort of romantic interest and you're balancing all this. You could also meditate for four hours a day and... We just don't have time for that. So how do I make it really effective? And how do I make it take a small amount of time for my brain to work, for me to have epic levels of energy and just more resilience than anyone else? And if you can do that,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
you will be really successful, not just in your entrepreneurial life, but in your personal life. And it depends on how many friends you have of different ages. Show me an entrepreneur who's killing it at work when their relationship is falling apart at home. It doesn't work. So your relationships are a part of your environment that affects you as a biohacker. So we want happiness.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
We want the ability to be in whatever state we choose, whether it's focused or relaxed, so no one can trigger us. You can't do just one thing. You have to have brain, you have to have energy, you need to have your body, you need to have your longevity. It's just a lot easier and cheaper to do this if you start in your 20s or 30s than if you wait till you're 40 or 50.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Wow, I do everything.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
You know, there's always been seventh grade bullies who don't like something, so they just insult it instead of saying something meaningful. And you can say biohacking is non-scientific, except there's this weird thing we do called science as biohackers. Say, I wanted to get this result. So what are the things that have scientific studies behind them or just have clinical evidence behind them?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Let's try those and measure the results. And when someone says biohacking isn't scientific, these are the same kind of people that will say A-B testing your ads online is not scientific. What do you mean it's not scientific? I tried it and it worked or it didn't work.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And the thing about being an entrepreneur for my entire life, if you believe something is going to work in your business and you just keep doing it despite the evidence, you will go out of business. So if you think billboards are going to be a great way of advertising, you put a million dollars into billboards and you don't sell anything. You go, well, I believe billboards work.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Let me put another million in. But we do this all the time with our stupid oatmeal in the morning, with kale and with our health. And then these arrogant pharmaceutical-backed people go, well, biohacking is not scientific. I'm like, guys, the whole point of biohacking is I'm only going to do what works and I'm going to measure results the same way I do in my business.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I'm going to do it for my sleep, for my stress, for my inflammation, for my aging. And if I'm doing something wrong, I'll change it. How is that unscientific? It's the most obvious thing on the planet. What's going on here? There's a lot of people with a vested interest in you not having the data and you not having the knowledge and you're not even having the right to control your own biology.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So you can insult biohacking all you want. There are tens of millions of biohackers all over the planet. I'm hosting my biohacking conference here in Austin, 4,000 people in May. biohackingconference.com and more than 100 vendors. This is depending on which analysts you like. Biohacking is now probably a $16 billion industry going up to $63 billion.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
I don't know if I believe the analysts, but I even coach hundreds of entrepreneurs at the business of biohacking event I put on. And the whole point here is this is an industry and we are not medical, although a lot of doctors are doing biohacking because it complements medical. And my biohacking facility is called Upgrade Labs. 32 locations open across the U.S. and Canada.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And we're partnering with entrepreneurs all over the place who are saying, I want to bring biohacking to my community using AI, using data. And there's not even a mirror in my biohacking facilities. At Upgrade Labs, your only mirror is your data. How am I actually doing? There's no self-deception. There's no religious belief.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
Oh, you know, I saw an ad from a drug company or from Kraft Foods or General Mills telling me Froot Loops was part of a healthy breakfast. So I just believed it. I kept eating Froot Loops and getting fat. This is what they want. But entrepreneurs, one of the gifts we have is we want to make the world a better place. And we don't really suffer bullshit. Right.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
So sure, you can say biohacking is elitist too, because sleeping in a dark room is elitist. Having dimmer switches is elitist. Lowering your thermostat is elitist. Eating healthy food is elitist. Or is this just the manual for being a healthy, effective human? That's what I believe. Most biohacks are based on principles that are free. All of my books have the free version. the cheap version.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking Your Way to Better Health and Business Success | Mental Health | E351
And here's what the crazy billionaires are doing in order to prove that it works. And yes, I do all the crazy billionaire stuff because that's my job and I get to do it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I just want to share things. It makes me feel good to help people. I didn't understand that flow states come from service to others because we didn't have the science for that. So all of a sudden, I'm motivated to stay up late and write these blog posts and to share this knowledge and to start a podcast. before podcasts were really much of a thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I've been blessed to be, I don't know if it's genetic or something, but I'm a futurist. I can see what's coming and like podcasts. Yeah, that's going to be, it's going to be a big thing. And it's why I was successful in tech as well, because I could say I could tell the direction of it. And if some people are good at telling the weather, that's what I do. I tell the future. And so for this podcast,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
This just seemed like it mattered.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I wanted to do it for no financial motivation whatsoever. I just didn't want anyone to suffer the way I had. No other motivation. And now it's made me pretty successful.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Hold on a second here. You're trying to cut me short. It's at least 180. Oh, that's not the ceiling. That's the floor. Just so we're clear. Okay.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Here's why it's possible. Do you know what the best we can do today is?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
There you go. It's about 120, 122 maybe. So our current best is 120. If you were 120 years old today, you were born around 1901. We didn't have airplanes. World War I would be fought largely on horseback. We didn't have DNA because we couldn't spell it. Actually, we had it. We just didn't know about it. We had no antibiotics. We didn't have public sanitation and you still live to 120.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So if that's possible and you probably drank and smoked every day too. Okay. If you can do that, why can't we do 50% better than our current best in the next hundred years? Hmm. OK, because the next hundred years is going to be way different than the last hundred years, because the last hundred years we did not have computers to make ourselves faster and better.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
What we're doing now is every 18 months we double our compute capacity. That's Moore's law, and it's held strong for ridiculous amounts of time. What that means is that you and I are going to live longer because we have the technology to talk about living longer that we didn't have before. And my company, 40 Years of Zen.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
that does neuroscience brain upgrades has the ability to do machine learning on your brain waves. One of the companies I am an investor and advisor to, Viome, just discovered 10,000 new species of gut bacteria that didn't exist, that live in humans, that we didn't know about. And it's 2020, whatever it is today, right? That is phenomenal. So given all of that,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
If a comet doesn't hit the planet, it is inevitable that we will improve only 50% on our current best in the next 100 years. In fact, we'll do way better than that. My job is to explain and make it real so that everyone knows this is possible and it is coming. And so it becomes our expectation. The same thing happened if you go back to when the Wright brothers were about to fly.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
They're working on flying machines and everyone looks around and goes, those idiots, who do they think they are? Don't they know man will never fly? Literally, they were saying that a week before it happened. And then all of a sudden it happens. And then, oh, yeah, of course we can do that. It's always been that way.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When I was a kid, I had all the behavioral problems that are common in entrepreneurs, what we would now call ADHD. But I also had Asperger's syndrome, which is a neurological condition, and it's on the autism spectrum. I don't present as someone with Asperger's anymore, and I, in fact, don't likely have it because it is a curable condition. It's related to autoimmunity. I was also overweight.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So every great change that is brought about, usually by entrepreneurs or entrepreneurs in combination with crazy inventors, when they pair up, it's very it's very powerful. And when that happens magically, suddenly it's obvious. And we're at that stage right now with anti-aging.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When I started this, I was the only person under 30 attending a meeting, a nonprofit that was based next door to Stanford University called the Silicon Valley Health Institute. I ended up becoming chairman. I'm learning from an 88-year-old and I'm 26. And he had more energy than I did at the time. Okay. What? These guys were considered truly crazy.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And so did the people who talked about smart drugs. Where we are now with nootropics, nootropics are a thing and people know that they work. And I played a hand in that as well. I went on Nightline and said, guys, I took a smart drug called modafinil for eight years, which is the limitless drug. And it got me through Wharton Business School. And I don't regret it one bit. It was a beautiful thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I don't need it anymore because my brain's that fast without it. By the way, have you noticed...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I kissed a Smurf. I use a compound called methylene blue, which I've written about in a couple of my books that enhances mitochondrial function. It's a nootropic. It's just one that makes your tongue blue.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I had chronic fatigue syndrome, which was diagnosed by a couple of people, fibromyalgia, thyroid problems, lower testosterone than my mom in my 20s in labs, high risk of stroke and heart attack before I was 30, arthritis when I was 14. So I think I was pretty much, you could say biologically a shit show as a kid. I don't know if I can say that on here.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
There is a maximum life. Absolutely. So there's two of them. The longest one is the universe, as we understand it, will collapse in on itself. There's probably going to be a hard limit that's based on physics and stuff like that. I'm less worried about that. The real limit to human lifespan is curiosity.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
As long as you have a reason to live, to be of service to others, to be curious about things, to be constantly learning and walking around with that childlike curiosity going, I wonder why that works. How is it that way? How can I make that better? If you have the biology so that when you're old, you look and feel like you do now.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
We're not talking about the skin so thin you can see through it with tubes and monitors and diapers and not knowing your own name. People think that's aging. That is an aberration. It has never existed in all of human history, except for in the last maybe 40, 50 years. And it's sick and wrong.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So we are on the path of returning to having our village elders, the keepers of the knowledge and returning them to. to what is right, which is a level of respect and veneration for our elders, because they will keep us from making mistakes. And here's why this matters. You look back to when I made that $6 million, or even better yet, when I sold that first t-shirt online.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Now, I was exactly the same age as Marc Andreessen, who's a really famous investor, multi-multi-billionaire. Now, Marc created the first web browser. I did the first e-commerce. Very similar, about as similar as you can. In fact, I wrote an article as a journalist about his first web browser. So we're in the same thing. He flew to Silicon Valley. I would have had to drive.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I was 80 miles from Silicon Valley. But he flew to Silicon Valley and he found a guy 20 years older who ran one of the large tech companies and said, teach me. And he did. What did I do? I said, I'll do it all myself. I knew everything. Right. I had a big ego. Right. So I did not do that. And at this point, Mark's a multibillionaire and I'm not. OK, I'm OK with that. I'm doing quite well.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You can beat me out or something, but not in a good place. That said, I did, let's see, I was at the top of my class in high school, but I was such a jerk that they wouldn't let me be valedictorian.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Thank you very much. But it took me another 10 or 15 years to figure out the value of mentorship and to basically get control of my ego so that I could listen to and learn from others. So I'd have to make all the mistakes myself. That's a really, really big thing. We can do that with aging. We can do that with everything, but it comes down to curiosity and willingness to learn.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And we've, we've just got to get that. That's what keeps you young. So once you're bored, even if you have the biology, the real goal of anti-aging, you should die at a time and by a method of your choice. When you're done, you're done.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I love it that you brought up Alzheimer's. My book, Headstrong, was on the New York Times monthly science bestseller list sandwiched between Homo Deus and Sapiens, two of my other favorite books. I'm like, oh, I finally made the big list. I look at me. I'm a big deal. But I was just sort of in awe going, oh, my God, I can't believe that happened. I wasn't expecting it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But that book is largely based on research around Alzheimer's. And I've had Dale Bredesen on my podcast who wrote The End of Alzheimer's. And I was a couple years ago, the largest donor to the women's Alzheimer's movement, which is Maria Shriver's charity. She's been on my show as well. Women get Alzheimer's twice as much as men do. And we don't talk about that nearly as much as we should.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Alzheimer's is preventable and avoidable. It's not even that hard, given what we know now. But But reversing it is a little bit more work. And if you're a late stage, it might not be reversible.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But if you in your mind today listening to this saying, oh, it's inevitable that I'm going to get cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and Alzheimer's, which are the big four killers that you have to avoid to live a long time. You're totally wrong. These are metabolic diseases. You can fix your metabolism.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
That's not to say that I was doing that well in high school. I was just at a school that wasn't that competitive.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
In fact, my newest startup, the one where I'm CEO and fully focused now is called Upgrade Labs. And we're opening franchise locations across the US and Canada to start and soon the world where you can come in and fix your metabolism in less time than you currently spend going to the gym.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So you get your cardio, get your strength, get your neurofeedback and fix your metabolism because we know how, because of machine learning, because of artificial intelligence, because of tech. So you can do better than Caveman did. And this is all necessary if you don't want to go down that path of slow degradation that is not natural.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Here's the deal. OK. It is ageist to talk about someone's age. Right. So if I am allowed to specify the gender I identify as and I'm allowed to choose the race I identify as, I'll be damned if I'm not allowed to choose the age I identify as. I'm 28 percent right now. I'm 28% of my goal. So I'm not 49, not 48. So I'm 28%. And everyone listening, get this, pick a number. That's your goal.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You are the percentage of that. And if you believe in this whole, oh, identify with a calendar. No, screw the calendar. The calendar is wrong. If you measure my biology, I am measurably younger than my number of years. So that's what I identify as.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's awesome.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
All right. Well, it depends on which... which measure of age you want to look at. And right now, there isn't one accepted thing. I just did a big show on this. And one of the probably more trustworthy tests is called TrueAge. And this is one that looks at the types of sugar molecules that line your cells. And it looks at DNA methylation.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Actually, those are two different methods of looking at aging. So you look at those things and I am between five and eight years younger than my biological age right now. And when I get the new tests, I would not be surprised if now it's going to be about 12 years because I just did some more interventions that are lengthening telomeres.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But telomere length, which is the old way of measuring aging, probably probably isn't as accurate as we hoped it would be. So there's all sorts of discussions about it. But the number one thing is, do you wake up and you have more energy than you did 20 years ago? That's a pretty good sign that something's working, right? And do you wake up and your body hurts?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
That's a sign something's not working. So like you, you have an unfair advantage. See, I started out with bad genetics and bad lifestyle that I thought was a good lifestyle. And I recovered from all that. You are preventing the damage in the first place because you're in your 30s. And we know more now than we did when I was in my 30s. And you actually took action early in your life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Most people are like, are you kidding? Here's what I care about in my 20s. I care about having enough money to make sure that I get laid. Sorry, human development, all personal development right there. People care about power and they care about reproduction. Not because we choose to, because our biology does that for us when we're not paying attention.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then we're like, oh, why did I go on the date instead of the job interview? You just blame yourself when you think you're a bad person. No, it's because your biology told you to do that. And your biology is in charge more than we like to think. And this is the struggle of personal development.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So whatever you did, whatever your parents did that made you wise enough to take care of your hardware means that your rate of aging is going to be flat forever. Whereas someone who says, I'm just going to go party and drink way more than I should and eat ramen all the time because it's cheap, their rate of aging is going to be really steep. They just don't feel it until they're 35.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So kudos to you. And I want everyone to not do what I did when I was 16 because I just didn't do it right.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Before we get there, I didn't answer your last question.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I have spent, at this point, around $2 million on anti-aging, on upgrading my biology. Part of that, I built a lab here at my house that has all of the gear that is now a part of Upgrade Labs. So when you're able to go to an Upgrade Labs, or if you open an Upgrade Labs franchise in your neighborhood, a lot of the gear there, well, I bought all that gear, and I've spent...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
God knows how much on lab testing, on traveling around the world and trying all of the anti-aging technologies that billionaires are doing right now. And that was the subject of Superhuman, which is my big anti-aging book that tells you all of the stuff that you can do now, including the free stuff.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Yeah. Yeah. In fact, it seems to make people mad when I talk about that. In the early days of the Internet, I mean, early days before web browsers were created, it was entirely possible to know everything on the Internet because it was something called Usenet was where most people communicated and you could follow all of the groups. And these were kind of like Reddit forums today.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So the problem is that when you're young, you're not going to spend $100,000 on a stem cell treatment. It doesn't even make sense because you don't need to because you have young stem cells, right? So that's part of it. But there are things you can do now that we know what's making you older.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
The things you could do that are free that give you the advantages so you can hold off on spending lots more money as you age in order to not age. So the biggest one you can do that has the highest ROI is intermittent fasting, which is my latest book.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Wow, it's sort of like, okay, you have a car and you wanna keep your car running for a long time. So what was more important, changing the oil or rotating the tires?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
probably both important like if you don't rotate the tires you're going to have a blowout and flip the car and that's no good right but if you don't change the oil the engine's going to wear out before it's time so which one's more important it's really hard for me to say that but i will tell you that having a healthy metabolism that makes energy very effectively from air plus food if you can hack that system everything else including your cognition your meditation your personal development
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Your rate of aging, your DNA methylation, all of it will be better. So fixing your metabolism would be the number one thing. And of all the things I've done, which fixed it? A lot. Supplements are important. You absolutely need to be taking supplements. The reason is straightforward.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You'll never get all of your nutrients from food because that presupposes you get all of your toxins from Mother Nature. You live in a world that is not the natural world. You need to support the systems in your body for the world you live in. That's why you use supplements. The other thing is intermittent fasting, brief periods of exercise, not over exercising is also very important.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And so those are some of the very basic cheap things. And frankly, sleeping, learning how to sleep. When I was a young entrepreneur on sleep, why would I do that? I could learn instead of sleep. So I would sleep five hours a night sometimes because I had work, I had things to do. The ROI on sleep is very high.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But a new study came out literally two days before we recorded this that showed sleeping more than six and a half hours a night is related to negative changes neurologically. The correct amount of time for high performance, healthy people who are not under undue stress is about six and a half hours a night. I went from five hours. Sorry.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I went from five minutes of deep sleep and five minutes of REM sleep. in a six and a half hour period 15 years ago to getting an hour and a half to two hours of deep sleep and an hour and a half to two hours of REM sleep. That is more sleep than a 20 year old gets in eight hours. I'm getting as a 48 year old who identifies as a 28 year old in six and a half hours. So less sleep, but more quality.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
That in and of itself is your biggest anti-aging strategy right now. So learn how to sleep and learn how to skip breakfast. Those two things are going to buy you 20 years, even if you don't spend any money on it.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Fasting means to go without. That's it. And people say, well, fasting means you can have no calories. You can only have water. because that's what mice did in a study. Like, well, I hate to tell you, there's something called dry fasting. That's when you fast without water too. So which is the real fasting? Right.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But imagine if Reddit only had 100 forums. OK, you could follow all those if you wanted to spend a good amount of time doing it. So I did go out there. I had a, let's just say it was a nine times increase in my tuition at the university of California. Uh, when I was on Joe Rogan show, I said it was 15 times. I had made a math error. That was the only error that I had on that show.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Well, there is no real definition other than the one I just gave, which is to go without. You can fast from alcohol. It's called abstaining. You can fast from sex. It's called chastity or celibacy, whatever you want to call it. And you can fast from hate, which is called compassion meditation. It's called forgiveness.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
All of those are practices of fasting, saying I am not going to do X for some period of time. And it turns out when fasting from food, it's not even fasting from calories. It's fasting from specific types of calories that cause metabolic changes you don't want. So I wrote the first book, which is about fasting for performance, a working fast versus fasting for a spiritual fast.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I fasted in a cave for four days led by a shaman who was remote from me. So I'm all by myself because I knew that if I didn't eat, this was going back to 2008, If I didn't eat six meals a day, I would go into starvation mode, which is not a real thing. And then that would make me fat and some bizarre mental gymnastics taught to me by big food.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I also knew that I would get hypoglycemic, which meant that if I didn't eat often, I would yell at everyone around me because I would get cranky. So I'm like, put me in a cave. No food, no one to yell at. Everybody wins. And the book is actually based on the psychology of fasting plus the physiology of fasting. And I say, here's how to fast without pain.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So you work better than you did before and you save money and time in the morning.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
and then here's what to do on a weekend or when you want to do a spiritual fast and today 70 000 people have done the free fasting training the challenge that comes with the book fastestway.com is where that is and i just want people to learn if you skip breakfast the right way you're nicer to the people around you you're more focused than you were before your metabolism gets better you're less likely to get diabetes and cancer and alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease and you save money and time
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Like it's the best, highest return on investment hack there is.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So anyway, I couldn't pay for it. So I'm going to start a business here. What can I do? Well, I like caffeine. So I emailed a caffeine scientist and said, tell me about the caffeine molecule. And I'm whatever, 19 or something. And. he tells me a bunch of stuff. So I made a t-shirt and said, caffeine, my drug of choice with a picture of the caffeine molecule.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I posted to the discussion group where we talked about coffee and said, you guys should buy this. And then, Oh, two weeks later. And I did really well. I sold shirts in my first month to 16 countries and, And OK, I'm living in a shared one bedroom apartment that I can barely afford, like not not the the, you know, college experience that someone who's having their college paid for would have.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's not true.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And the reason the book is called Fast This Way is that there isn't one way. It's biologically unique. So let's just suppose that last night you went out and you maybe had a few drinks with friends and you stayed up till midnight, right? And then you woke up this morning and said, I'm going to fast. You already blew out your biology. You messed with your sleep. You had alcohol.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You probably ate way late. Maybe you worked out the day before too. So you're already at a point of biological stress. Adding fasting as a stressor on top of a stressed body isn't going to work very well. Have some breakfast. It's OK. Right. And then let's say that another day you went to bed on time. You didn't have a late dinner and you didn't have a bright TV in your eyes and whatever.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So you wake up and you're just fully charged and you're ready to go. Maybe you should fast for more than six hours. The evidence shows at least a 12-hour fast three days a week, this is in women over 40 specifically, creates metabolic benefits. So for most people, most days, at least 14 hours without food is a good idea. However, 14 hours, I would starve. No, when you're asleep counts.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's like have dinner, earlier dinners are better. So have dinner at five. Let's say you're done eating at six. If you don't eat snacks and dessert after that and you wake up at 6 a.m., you already fasted 12 hours. You could just wait two more hours and you did a 14-hour fast. So you have breakfast at 8. It's not that big of a deal. But that midnight snack ruins you biologically.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And if you're saying, okay, I can go past 8. I'm just going to wait and have some breakfast-y kind of thing at 10. Well, you just did a 16 hour fast. You wait till noon. Oh my God, you did an 18 hour fast, 18 six fast. That's what all the paleo people do. It's not that hard, but here's when it's hard. And I say this as a guy who was obese for much of my life.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
If when you wake up, you have a gnawing hunger, and all you can do is think about food, and you go into the office, and someone has a plate of donuts there, the donut's gonna win. It's gonna say, eat me, and you're gonna say, no. And it's gonna say, eat me, and you're gonna say, no. And the conversation gets more and more shrill, and it's like arguing with a two-year-old.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Eventually, they're just gonna wear you down, and you go, fine, I'll eat half, and you have just a bite of donut. And then you go, God damn it. Why am I such a bad person? I'm so weak. No, biology dictates that this will happen to you, especially when you're not a fat adapted. We don't have a flexible metabolism.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So what I teach people to do in the fasting challenge or by reading the book, but the fasting challenge is free fast this way.com. It's look, there are things you can do that turn off hunger so that in the morning, I just don't care about food. The donuts are in front of you and there is no voice telling you to eat it because you're like, I don't want it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And it's so much, it's just easier that way. Because what happens is your willpower is a finite resource. And if you spend all of your willpower saying no to donuts, no to your biology, it just keeps asking you because your biology doesn't have what it needs. You're probably not going to have enough left over to be nice to the people around you, to be focused at work, to do what you want to do.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then you're going to beat yourself up and think it was you. So Fast This Way is about the mindset and the physical tools to make yourself never hungry when you're fasting. And then it's just easy.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Autophagy.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
People who read my first big book called The Bulletproof Diet, that's probably more than half a million copies now, 16 languages, and people have lost more than a million pounds on The Bulletproof Diet. It was probably the first modern keto book, except it wasn't just about keto. What ketosis is, is something that happens when you fast or when you only eat fat regularly.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And. I'm thinking, OK, now I can maybe make ends meet. This is really good. And then a Rutgers professor of marketing says no one's ever going to make money on the Internet. So with a chip on my shoulders, an angry, mold exposed kid, I wrote back. So, well, you may be at an Ivy League school, but I'm already making money on the Internet. So you're wrong. Ha ha.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
or maybe very, very small amounts of carbs and protein and all. But it's when your body says, I've got no carbs and no protein to burn. What will I do? I guess I should burn fat. This is a major part of how I lost the 100 pounds of fat that I lost.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
The only problem is that in the Bulletproof Diet, I teach people, here's how to use ketosis for a brief period and then how to switch out of it and then go back in. And if you're saying, I'm only going to eat peanut butter and margarine you're not going to have the same results as if you eat the stuff that I talk about, actually grass-fed butter instead of peanut butter.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So the type of things you eat when you're doing ketosis matters greatly. But essentially, it's fat-burning mode, and we're all capable of it. And if you go into ketosis even briefly – It has a side effect that no one talks about that's so important. When I weighed 300 pounds, there were many times I would lose 30 or 40 pounds and it would come roaring back plus 10.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It happens to anyone who's been fat. And right now it's like 60, 70% of the US is overweight and struggling with exactly what I went through and what I don't ever think about now. And when you go into ketosis, it resets your body's hunger to that of your current body weight.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
If instead you go, oh, I'm going to do what those 1970s people online say, oh, you just have to work out more and eat less and you'll lose weight. No, I tried that. I beat myself up. I gave myself an autoimmune condition doing that. It does not work. You might lose weight for a little bit of time, but it will come back. So what happens there?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You go on ketosis and all of a sudden, if I weighed 300 pounds, I lost 50 pounds with ketosis. I'm still going to have the hunger of a 300-year-old unless I use ketosis, right? So that's why it matters so much. So that's keto. And autophagy is a totally different thing. If you think about Las Vegas, all those lights everywhere, before they turned to LEDs, there were teams, a
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Hundreds of people, their job was to go out and find the dim bulbs and the bulbs that were out and go up on a ladder and take out that bulb and put in a new one so that you didn't have any bulbs out. Well, your body has quadrillions of little power plants and some of them are weaker than others. When you fast, your body goes through and says, what are the weakest ones?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Let me get rid of those, break them down and use them as building blocks to make new, healthy, young mitochondria. So when you fast, you get the benefits of ketosis, weight loss and mental function and a reduction in Alzheimer's. And you get the benefits of autophagy, which is replacing older power plants with younger ones. Oh, and how much did it cost?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
You actually got paid to do it because you didn't spend money on breakfast and you didn't spend time on breakfast. It is the simplest thing to just go, oh, this makes sense.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Ramadan.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And the next day, the Miami Herald called. And they wrote about my little business. And pretty soon I'm in Entrepreneur Magazine with a picture of me in a double extra large T-shirt talking about how you can make money on this inner something or another. Two weeks after that, the first spam came out. And I apologize because the people who did that read the article about me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Well, it turns out a lot of the studies I reference in Fast This Way are using Ramadan, which is one of our biggest studies of a certain style of fasting. And it's intermittent dry fasting. It turns out there are health benefits to Ramadan, which are built in. And a lot of the ancient nutritional practices that you'll find through whatever culture you're looking at are around health.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
For instance, the don't eat pork that you find in multiple religions. It's because pork...
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
usually had parasites in it and pork that is not refrigerated properly has high levels of histamine which is inflammatory so if you were making rules for your population you'd be like don't eat that stuff because it causes problems a lot of times however if it's preserved properly and it's fed properly it has different effects but they didn't have the technology or the abilities there so they just don't do it right which makes sense now
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
what i would say is that it actually is healthy and there are many many people who practice ramadan and the last thing they have before they go into ramadan right before the sun comes up is a huge cup of bulletproof coffee and they do that because in fastest way i talk about the mechanisms of butter and specifically the mct oil and coffee itself to turn off hunger for long periods of time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So at that point, their ketone levels spike and the ketones suppress hunger. So then they don't think about hunger all day long and get this, when your body is burning fat, guess what a side effect of burning fat is?
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Water.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It makes water. That's why camels store fat in their humps. No, they store fat in their humps, but it's water. So they burn the fat in the hump to make water so they don't need to drink water. So if you are in Ramadan and you have ketosis going on, you are hydrating yourselves through burning fat and you're not hungry because you're burning fat. And then it's a much less painful fast.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Now, eating after dark is just not good for you, but that's traditional in the Middle East. I've spent a lot of time in Dubai, been to Oman and have investors in my companies from that part of the world. And I do have a hard time. I have dinner at 10 o'clock at night. I don't sleep as well, but that's because of the intense sun during the day.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So you've got to adjust what you do for where you live.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I do this, next time it's Ramadan, you haven't done this in a long time, connect to your roots, try it for just a week. Just a week, not the whole month. And see if instead of being sluggish, tired, slow, the reason you're sluggish and tired and slow is because what you eat at night is full of sugar and carbs and stuff like that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But when people say, oh, I'm going to practice Ramadan, but I'm going to eat foods that don't cause hunger all day long. Suddenly they just it's like rocket fuel and it's totally sustainable for a month.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And in the article, I warned against marketing on the Internet if you weren't a part of the community. And so the first spammers on Earth were attorneys. Their names were Cantor and Siegel. And if you look back on the history of the Internet, that's how it was. So yeah, I was there. I did it. And I did it one day before the guys who currently run wine.com did it.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
16-8 fast means that you don't eat for 16 hours and you eat whatever you want during that eight hours. This is what works for most people most of the time, as long as you don't do too much of it. And it gives you most of the benefits of intermittent fasting, which can be slightly longer, slightly less long.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
One meal a day means what it says. So it's a 24 hour fast every day. In fact, if during Ramadan, you were to say, I'm just going to eat breakfast right before the sun comes up, you'd be doing OMAD. OMAD is fantastic. It gives you more autophagy. However, most people I find who do OMAD every single day for more than especially about five days, their sleep quality goes down.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Women's before men's because women and men actually do fast differently. That's part of the teachings in Fast This Way.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
5-2 fasts. That's a fast where for two days of the week, you either eat very low calories or no calories. And five days, you eat whatever the heck you want, whenever the heck you want. And there's plenty of evidence that says that works. I find it's much less sustainable for long periods of time. Probably doesn't work as well as just skipping breakfast most days.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
spontaneous meal skipping just says, oh, I don't feel like eating. I'm not going to eat. You should always do that. But here's the deal. If you want to eat within four hours of a meal, your last meal was built wrong. You have that kale salad you thought was healthy. No, it wasn't healthy. It just made you hungry. So if you just don't feel like eating, don't eat.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
The problem is that skipping meals doesn't really make it fasting unless you're skipping breakfast or you're skipping dinner because you just aren't getting that 12 hour plus window of having no food.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
There is something I call the fasting trap. And it's the same as the exercise trap. It's the same as the keto trap. It's the same as the vegan trap. If you think something is good and you got results, more of it must be better. It's just basic human thinking. The problem with fasting is that when you fast too much,
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
then bad things start to happen but you're convinced that fasting works for you so then you fast even more and you end up making yourself sick women hit the fasting trap before men do usually in about six weeks of over of over fasting men it's usually closer to eight or even 12 weeks here's what it looks like for women when you over fast you get that fasting trap and over fasting means just fasting for too long too many days in a row
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
But at the time it was literally checks in the mail, t-shirts sent back, trying to make ends meet and also scooping ice cream at Baskin Robbins. I was just being scrappy. It seemed obvious to me. And this is why young entrepreneurs totally kick ass because you don't even know how cool what you're doing is until you look back on it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Number one, you wake up and you feel like you didn't sleep. Your sleep quality goes down. Number two, your hormones start not working right. Your cycle is less regular. You have more symptoms. I don't normally get that. And then number three is hair thinning. And with guys, it hits us a couple of weeks later if we're over fasting. Number one, we don't sleep as well.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
If you're monitoring your sleep, you see changes or you just wake up and feel just not well rested today. Maybe I'll just have more coffee and fast extra today. Not a good idea. Second thing, guys, experience is you wake up without a kickstand. And the third thing is you're looking at me like you don't know what I'm talking about, but you know what I'm talking about.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And then the third one, see, I didn't trigger any warnings there. The third one for guys is also hair thinning. So this is why for women, it's different. And women are more susceptible to over fasting. And it isn't true for all women. This is why fast this way. You must fast based on your current biological state, your current readiness.
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Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So there are also changes that occur at different times of the month where you are in your cycle. Right. So for some women, when you're menstruating, like, OK, I really do great fasting. Other women, I need to eat because my blood sugar is unstable. But you've got to figure out what it is so that you feel good and you're not overdoing it. And I talk about the techniques in the book for that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
My secret to profiting in life is don't worry about profiting in life. That's not what you're here to do. You should evolve in life and profit is a side effect.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Go to Dave Asprey dot com. There's 3000 articles, 1000 hours of video. There's a vibrant learning community called the Upgrade Collective. And there are free challenges where I just teach you all my books for free because I just want you to have the knowledge. Because, well, if you have that knowledge, then you won't suffer the way I did. And everybody wins.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It was fun.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Cause you don't have the life experience to go, Oh my God, it's totally transformative. By the time you can tell it's transformative, you're probably too late.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Well, they always like to say, follow your passion and it's kind of true, but here's the thing. My passion really was, I want to change the world to make it better. And coffee is a way to do that. Your day is measurably better if you have coffee in the morning, if you're like 90% of people. So if you're the other 10%, I'm sorry, you have bad genetics and you shouldn't reproduce. Okay.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Just kidding. Okay. But there are 10% of people who don't tolerate coffee. But okay, that's one way. Eating quality food makes the world a better place. But at the time, having a digital nervous system for the planet so we could have the conversation we're having right now, I worked on the network engineering and protocols
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
When Google was two guys and two computers, the company that I helped to co-found a part of this company that held their servers and designed architecture for many of the biggest brands out there when it was the Facebook, that mattered because we were building a way for all of us to connect so that you and I could have this conversation.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Because if you go back 25 years, there was no way for us to know about each other. much less to meet each other and have a conversation. So the world has become much better because of that. And in the last two years, now that we've turned on government censorship, it's become actually maybe worse because of it. So we've got to fix that. But that's a short-term blip.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Well, I'm going to make a bunch of people mad now, too. I got tired of studying computer science because here I was, I had a web page. I had started a business online and all of computer science was how do you do esoteric math on large computers? Like this isn't how this doesn't match my view of where the world's going.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So I dropped out and I got a degree instead in something called information systems, which is how do you solve problems? And my concentration was in a form of artificial intelligence. There, how do I make a business work better? How do I solve a problem using computers instead of how do I do science stuff in a lab somewhere?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And a lot of computer science still to this day is very esoteric and theory based versus let's go out there and change something. And as an entrepreneur minded person. It hurts to not make things better. And so that was why I went out. But then I got to Silicon Valley. And by the time I was 26, I did make six million bucks. I lost it when I was 28. It's an important part of the journey.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
This is about having a good mentorship, good advice and being willing to take it. But that whole path, I said, OK, I'm going to lose the weight. I'll just work out hour and a half a day, six days a week, go on a low fat, low calorie diet. I will use my willpower. And after 18 months of that, what I found was I could max out all but two of the machines at the gym. I still had a 46 inch waist.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I still weighed 300 pounds and no, I was tired. So it didn't work. And it was sitting down. at Carl's Jr. with some friends. And I thought to myself, wait a minute, I'm having the chicken salad with no dressing and no chicken, right? Because I'm the lowest calorie, low fat thing. My friends are eating double Western bacon cheeseburgers.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I work out more than all my friends combined and I'm the fat one. And I thought, it isn't that I'm doing something wrong. I used to think it was a moral failing. It was a weakness. It was that I needed to eat less lettuce. No. What I was doing wasn't working. And I just said, wait a minute. I just studied how to manage a complex system where you don't know what's going on.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Because that's what the internet is. I teach classes at the University of California on how to do this. And I can't do it to myself. My doctor, when I went in, said something's not right. So maybe you should try to lose weight. Like, no, really? You think so? Tell me how. Eat healthy. And I just fired the doctor.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I literally said, you're fired when he didn't know some very basic info about nutrition. And I went off and said, I'm going to do it myself. And so every night after I'd finish the building cloud computing phase of my career, I would go home and I would study biology because I didn't want to die. And I was tired of feeling like crap. So it was enlightened self-interest.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I started learning from people three times my age who ran an anti-aging nonprofit group who had more energy than I did. And I hacked it. And then I said, OK, fine. I'm a VP at a publicly traded computer security company in charge of cloud security. So I have some credibility in that space. I started blogging.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I said, you know, five people are gonna read my blog, but it's going to prevent them from spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on recovering their health. And I'm performing better than I ever have, better than I ever thought was possible, even when I was younger. And so five people avoid my pain, avoid all the money that I spent. I have done a solid for the world and I'm okay with that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I wasn't starting a company. I was sharing hard earned knowledge through suffering. And it turns out more than five people liked what I had to say. And pretty soon I said, I want to make coffee that doesn't make me crash. So I said, this will be my first product. The market size for functional coffee was zero. It's a multiple hundred million dollar product.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I said, I want a protein powder that works. I'm going to do the research and the work around collagen. Today, collagen is a billion dollar category. It was not. And I said, hmm, MCT oil from the anti-aging world. It's an unknown thing. It's now a billion dollar category.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So what I started as a blog to help people not go through what I went through with all the brain fog and obesity and arthritis and just acting like a jerk because you don't have enough energy to be nice. Well, I wrote it not for heavy people. I wrote it for entrepreneurs. I wrote it for tech people because we are the ones who put the most mental energy in. I don't care if I have dad bod.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I'm married. I have kids. I care about building companies. I care about leading teams. I care about innovating and creating. And that requires energy. And it turns out I grew abs as a side effect, not as the goal. You can build abs and feel like crap. Or you can build energy and abs grow. And I wanted to teach that to my people, which were the geeks. Pretty soon. Go ahead.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Pretty soon, though, it wasn't just entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. It was Wall Street where it took off next. Let's see. These people are working 16, 18 hour days. They never get a break. They need their brains to work all the time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
My seed capital for what became Bulletproof was actually an investment bank hiring me to fly around the world to meet with hedge fund managers to teach them how to be smarter.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And I did this so they could walk into the room with me. So their salespeople would come in because the hedge fund managers wouldn't take a meeting with a banker, but they would take a meeting with a brain hacker and a banker walking in with them. So I was the booth babe, for lack of a better word for hedge fund managers.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
I took the money from that and I used it to buy my first round of coffee and to hire the first members of my team. So that's how it got started. And I started until I could replace my salary from a publicly traded company. I worked as a VP and I grew Bulletproof.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
It's cool that you mentioned that. When I was young, it was like, look, I'll do anything for money because money is going to make me happy. And I really believe that. And it motivated a lot of my decisions. What taught me the two biggest lessons in my career, it was like money and fame are what people want. We're told that that will make us happy since we're young. Okay.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
So here I am, I'm 22, 23, whatever. I'm in entrepreneur magazine, like full color photo. Right. And I got some phone calls and some emails from people. And then two weeks later, okay, that was cool, but it didn't make me happy. And I was like, what the heck? I'm famous. I should be happy. I was happy for 10 minutes. Right. And. Then I said, OK, a little while our money. So I made a ton of money.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
Six million dollars in 19 late 1990s dollars is 18 million dollars in today dollars because of inflation driven by the government. So it should be enough. Right. I looked at a friend who all of us at this company. I mean, this was let's see. Our market cap hit $36 billion. We split three times in one year on NASDAQ.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
This is one of the most phenomenal companies that helped to build the first wave of internet companies. It's called Exodus Communications for people who were around back then. And I looked at a friend and I said, I'll be happy when I have $10 million because $6 million wasn't enough. And if you are motivated by money, you will probably act like a jerk and you will never be happy.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Dave Asprey: Biohacking for High Performing Entrepreneurs | Mental Health | YAPClassic
And you will have what the Buddhists call hungry ghost syndrome. And in the hungry ghost realm of hell, it's one of the many levels of hell Buddhists talk about. This is where no matter what you eat, you're constantly hungry and you walk around with a distended belly and you can never be satisfied. Yeah. So if when I finally figured out I'm going to start this thing as a it's just a blog.